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In the worst hour of the worst season
of the worst year of a whole people
a man set out from the workhouse with his wife.
He was walking – they were both walking – north.
She was sick with famine fever and could not keep up.
He lifted her and put her on his back.
He walked like that west and west and north.
Until at nightfall under freezing stars they arrived.
In the morning they were both found dead.
Of cold. Of hunger. Of the toxins of a whole history.
But her feet were held against his breastbone.
The last heat of his flesh was his last gift to her.
Let no love poem ever come to this threshold.
There is no place here for the inexact
praise of the easy graces and sensuality of the body.
There is only time for this merciless inventory:
Their death together in the winter of 1847.
Also what they suffered. How they lived.
And what there is between a man and woman.
And in which darkness it can best be proved.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eavan_Boland
I was watching Free Speech TV and heard Lynn Stewart read this poem. I was awestruck.
SIRATYST (Stuff I Read and Thought You Should Too) “Either the triumph of imperialism and the destruction of all culture, and, as in ancient Rome, depopulation, desolation, degeneration, a vast cemetery; OR, the VICTORY OF SOCIALISM, that is, the conscious struggle of the international proletariat against imperialism.” Rosa Luxemburg
1 comment:
Coincidence - I have the highest regard for this poem and am also an activist for Palestinian human rights. In fact, I am reciting the poem at a Pass on a Poem session this evening (18 May 2012). When I first read it a few weeks ago, in Eavan Boland's "New Collected Poems" (2005), I felt (figuratively speaking) like I'd been struck by lightning. Did you read as I did that in 1847 Ottoman Sultan Abdulmecid sent 3 boats of food for the starving Irish? A sort of Gaza flotilla in reverse.
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