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The Room in Which My First Child Slept

By Eavan Boland b. 1944 Eavan Boland

After a while I thought of it this way:

It was a town underneath a mountain

crowned by snow and every year a river

rushed through, enveloping the dusk

in a noise everyone knew signaled spring—

a small town, known for a kind of calico,

made there, strong and unglazed,

a makeshift of cotton in which the actual

unseparated husks still remained and

could be found if you looked behind

the coarse daisies and the red-billed bird

with swept-back wings always trying to

arrive safely on the inch or so of cotton it

might have occupied if anyone had offered it.

And if you ask me now what happened to it—

the town that is—the answer is of course

there was no town, it never actually

existed, and the calico, the glazed cotton

on which a bird never landed is not gone,

because it never was, never once, but then

how to explain that sometimes I can hear

the river in those first days of April, making

its way through the dusk, having learned

to speak the way I once spoke, saying

as if I didn't love you,

as if I wouldn't have died for you.

Source: Poetry (October 2006).

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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