isabelthespy:

-and not simply by the fact that this shading of
forest cannot show the fragrance of of basalm,
the gloom of cypresses,
is what I wish to prove.

When you and I were first in love we drove
to the borders of Connacht
and entered a wood there.

Look down you said: this was once a famine road.

I looked down at ivy and the scutch grass
rough-cast stone had
disappeared into as you told me
in the second winter of their ordeal, in

1847, when the crop had failed twice,
Relief Committees gave
the starving Irish such roads to build.

Where they died, there the road ended

and ends still and when I take down
the map of this island, it is never so
I can say here is
the masterful, the apt rendering of
the spherical as flat, nor
an ingenious design which persuades a curve
into a plane,
but to tell myself that

the line which says woodland and cries hunger
and gives out among sweet pine and cypress,
and finds no horizon

will not be there.

i am v. actively attempting to convince halfsquaretriangles she needs eavan boland in her life and while searching my blog for things of hers i’ve posted, i realized that, unbelievably, i have never posted this, the first poem of hers i read, which brought me to her instantly, because, well. to make poetry of history without doing so at history’s expensive, to forge beautiful phrases out of the past while retaining its brutality and without aestheticizing its ugliness - such a hard project but such is her gift.

This is one of my favorite poems, and my favorite title to any work ever.  But beyond that, famine roads are one of the more interesting things to read up on.  Back when Ireland wasn’t independent, and was basically being starved off, England had designated a large portion of the budget for “public works” that Ireland didn’t need.   So they came up with this system of being able to hire people, to feed them, in exchange for building roads that they had no plan or use for.   I can’t find it now, but I remember seeing a picture of one such road that just stopped, a perfect end, just before the start of a forest.  The uselessness and futility of it all makes my shoulders ache.  

(via teensniper)