A Woman Without a Country Quotes

“Eurydice Speaks”

How will I know you in the underworld?
How will we find each other?

We lived for so long on the physical earth—
Our skies littered with actual stars
Practical tides in our bay—
What will we do with the loneliness of the mythical?

Walking beside ditches brimming with dactyls,
By a ferryman whose feet are scanned for him
On the shore of a river written and rewritten
As elegy, epic, epode.

Remember the thin air of our earthly winters?
Frost was an iron, underhand descent.
Dusk was always in session

And no one needed to write down
Or restate, or make record of, or ever would,
And never will,
The plainspoken music of recognition,

Nor the way I often stood at the window—
The hills growing dark, saying,

As a shadow became a stride
And a raincoat was woven out of streetlight

I would know you anywhere.”
― Eavan Boland, A Woman Without a Country: Poems

“Nothing is left in my memory
of a summer
that promised nothing.

except the ominous
end of it. But I remember clearly
that autumn when darkness came

to lend its cover to a killing season
seeing at last these
ill-at-ease petals

estranged from moonlight and still
related to it: outcasts
of metal, of steel”
― Eavan Boland, A Woman Without a Country: Poems