Rain comes down through the alders,Its low conductive voicesMutter about let-downs and erosionsAnd yet each drop recallsThe diamond absolutes.
How perilous is it to choose not to love the life we’re shown?
Mid-Term BreakI sat all morning in the college sick bayCounting bells knelling classes to a close.At two o'clock our neighbours drove me home.In the porch I met my father crying—He had always taken fu...
It is always betterto avenge dear ones than to indulge in mourning.For every one of us, living in this worldmeans waiting for our end. Let whoever canwin glory before death. When a warrior is gone,tha...
But every now and then, just weighing in is what it must come down to, and without any self-exculpation or self-pity.
You carried your own burden and very soon your symptoms of creeping privilege disappeared.
We want what the woman wanted in the prison queue in Leningrad, standing there with cold and whispering for fear, enduring the terror of Stalin's regime and asking the poet Anna Akhmatova if she could...
Strange FruitHere is the girl's head like an exhumed gourd.Oval-faced, prune-skinned, prune-stones for teeth.They unswaddled the wet fern of her hairAnd made an exhibition of its coil,Let the air at h...
So hope for a great sea-changeOn the far side of revenge.Believe that further shoreIs reachable from here.
In off the moors, down through the mist beams, god-cursed Grendel came greedily loping.
I step through originslike a dog turningits memories of wildernesson the kitchen mat:the bog floor shakes,water cheeps and lispsas I walk downrushes and heather.I love this turf-face,it's black incisi...
Behaviour that's admiredis the path to power among people everywhere.
He sits, strong and blunt as a Celtic cross, Clearly used to silence and an armchair: Tonight the wife and children will be quiet At slammed door and smoker's cough in the hall.
Which would be better, what sticks or what falls through? Or does the choice itself create the value?
Then I thought of the tribe whose dances never fail / For they keep dancing till they sight the deer.
PostscriptAnd some time make the time to drive out westInto County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore,In September or October, when the windAnd the light are working off each otherSo that the ocean on one...
Over the waves, with the wind behind her and foam at her neck, she flew like a bird until her curved prow had covered the distance...
Only the very stupid or the very deprived can any longer help knowing that the documents of civilization have been written in blood and tears, blood and tears no less real for being very remote.
I composed habits for those acresso that my last look would beneither gluttonous nor starved.I was ready to go anywhere.
DiggingBetween my finger and my thumb The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.Under my window, a clean rasping sound When the spade sinks into gravelly ground: My father, digging. I look downTill his strai...