POEM OF THE DAY: EAVAN BOLAND'S "LIGHTS"
More Eavan Boland for you! This one is a bit longer, but totally worth the read-through. From her book Night Feed (1982), and one of many of her poems that talks about motherhood and the domestic space, often in the voice of a speaker who is up in the middle of the night, perhaps just before dawn, when everyone else is sleeping….Anything but sentimental, these poems. Both dreamy and textural, full of love and darkness.
LIGHTS
We sailed the long way home
on a coal-burning ship.
There were bracelets on our freighter
of porpoises and water.
When we came where icebergs
mark the stars of the Bear
I leaned over the stern.
I was an urban twelve.
This was the Arctic garden.
A hard, sharkless Eden
porched by the North.
A snow-shrubbed orchard
with Aurora Borealis––
apple-green and icy––
behind an ice wall.
But I was a child of the Fall:
I loved the python waves––
their sinuous, tailing blaze––
coiled in polar water
shoaling towards the cold
occasions where the daughters
of myth sang for sailors
who lay with them and lie
now in phosphor graves.
I like half-awake.
The last star is out
and my book is shut.
These August dawns
green the sky at four.
The child asleep beside me
stirs away in dreams.
I am three times twelve.
No more the Aurora,
its apple-icy brightness.
But if I raise the window
and lean I can see
now over the garden,
its ice-cap of shadow,
a nursery light rising,
a midnight sun dawning.
The day will be the same––
its cold illusory rays,
the afternooon's enclosure
and dusk's ambiguous gleams.
Doubt still sharks
the close suburban night.
And all the lights I love
leave me in the dark.
I love that moment when the poems shifts from dream into waking life (or half-waking life), which happens with the verb "lie" in the lines, "sailors who…lie / now in phosphor graves. // I lie half-awake." And as the speaker shifts into wakefulness, the child "stirs away in dreams," and the distance between the two deepens….We are left with the speaker, alone, who seems to find something hopeful, something like the Aurora Borealis and the "sharkless Eden" in the garden with its "nursery light rising." And yet….is it really hopeful? Is it light at all?
