#eavan boland

Quarantine

“First the leaning down, the pen becoming

If I defer the grief I will diminish the gift.

TRC characters as poems (specifically poems I studied for leaving cert English because I don't really know any other ones lol)(also I will not be elaborating on some of them cause they are vibes based)

My mother died one summer— the wettest in the records of the state. Crops rotted in the west. Checked tablecloths dissolved in back gardens. Empty deck chairs collected rain. As I took my way to her through traffic, through lilacs dripping blackly behind houses and on curbsides, to pay her the last tribute of a daughter, I thought of something I remembered I heard once, that the body is, or is said to be, almost all water and as I turned southward, that ours is a city of it, one in which every single day the elements begin a journey towards each other that will never, given our weather, fail—        the ocean visible in the edges cut by it, cloud color reaching into air, the Liffey storing one and summoning the other, salt greeting the lack of it at the North Wall and, as if that wasn't enough, all of it ending up almost every evening inside our speech— coast canal ocean river stream and now mother and I drove on and although the mind is unreliable in grief, at the next cloudburst it almost seemed they could be shades of each other, the way the body is of every one of them and now they were on the move again—fog into mist, mist into sea spray and both into the oily glaze that lay on the railings of the house she was dying in as I went inside.