The War Horse

By Eavan Boland b. 1944 Eavan Boland

This dry night, nothing unusual

About the clip, clop, casual

Iron of his shoes as he stamps death

Like a mint on the innocent coinage of earth.

I lift the window, watch the ambling feather

Of hock and fetlock, loosed from its daily tether

In the tinker camp on the Enniskerry Road,

Pass, his breath hissing, his snuffling head

Down. He is gone. No great harm is done.

Only a leaf of our laurel hedge is torn—

Of distant interest like a maimed limb,

Only a rose which now will never climb

The stone of our house, expendable, a mere

Line of defence against him, a volunteer

You might say, only a crocus, its bulbous head

Blown from growth, one of the screamless dead.

But we, we are safe, our unformed fear

Of fierce commitment gone; why should we care

If a rose, a hedge, a crocus are uprooted

Like corpses, remote, crushed, mutilated?

He stumbles on like a rumour of war, huge

Threatening. Neighbours use the subterfuge

Of curtains. He stumbles down our short street

Thankfully passing us. I pause, wait,

Then to breathe relief lean on the sill

And for a second only my blood is still

With atavism. That rose he smashed frays

Ribboned across our hedge, recalling days

Of burned countryside, illicit braid:

A cause ruined before, a world betrayed.

Eavan Boland, “The War Horse” from An Origin Like Water: Collected Poems 1967-1987. Copyright © 1996 by Eavan Boland. Reprinted with the permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. This selection may not be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Source: Collected Poems (W. W. Norton and Company Inc., 1995)

Biography

Eavan Boland was born in Dublin, Ireland in 1944. The daughter of a diplomat and a painter, Boland spent her girlhood in London and New York, returning to Ireland to attend secondary school in Killiney and later university at Trinity College in Dublin. Though still a student when she published her first collection, 23 Poems (1962), Boland’s early work is informed by her experiences as a young wife and mother, and her growing . . .

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