The Lost Land

By Eavan Boland

I have two daughters.

They are all I ever wanted from the earth.

Or almost all.

I also wanted one piece of ground:

One city trapped by hills. One urban river.

An island in its element.

So I could say mine. My own.

And mean it.

Now they are grown up and far away

and memory itself

has become an emigrant,

wandering in a place

where love dissembles itself as landscape:

Where the hills

are the colours of a child's eyes,

where my children are distances, horizons:

At night,

on the edge of sleep,

I can see the shore of Dublin Bay.

Its rocky sweep and its granite pier.

Is this, I say

how they must have seen it,

backing out on the mailboat at twilight,

shadows falling

on everything they had to leave?

And would love forever?

And then

I imagine myself

at the landward rail of that boat

searching for the last sight of a hand.

I see myself

on the underworld side of that water,

the darkness coming in fast, saying

all the names I know for a lost land:

Ireland. Absence. Daughter.

Copyright Credit: “The Lost Land” from THE LOST LAND by Eavan Boland. Copyright ©1998 by Eavan Boland. Used by permission of W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.

Source: The Lost Land (W. W. Norton and Company Inc., 1998)