by Eavan Boland
This is dawn.
Believe me
This is your season, little daughter.
The moment daisies open,
The hour mercurial rainwater
Makes a mirror for sparrows.
It’s time we drowned our sorrows.
I tiptoe in.
I lift you up
Wriggling
In your rosy, zipped sleeper.
Yes, this is the hour
For the early bird and me
When finder is keeper.
I crook the bottle.
How your suckle!
This is the best I can be,
Housewife
To this nursery
Where you hold on,
Dear life.
A silt of milk.
The last suck.
And now your eyes are open,
Birth-coloured and offended.
Earth wakes.
You go back to sleep.
The feed is ended.
Worms turn.
The stars go in.
Even the moon is losing face.
Poplars stilt for dawn
And we begin
The long fall from grace.
I tuck you in.
Eavan Boland (1944–2020) was born in Dublin and raised in London, New York, and Dublin. Her experiences of exile and identity deeply shaped her work. She received her BA from Trinity College Dublin in 1966. Boland authored numerous poetry collections, including A Woman Without a Country and New Collected Poems, and was known for centering women’s lives and Irish history in her verse. Her essays, such as A Journey with Two Maps, explored what it means to be a woman poet. She coedited The Making of a Poem with Mark Strand and taught at Trinity, Bowdoin, and Stanford, where she directed the creative writing program. Boland received many honors, including the Lannan Award and membership in the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. She died in California in 2020. A posthumous collection, Citizen Poet: New and Selected Essays, was published in 2024.