from Object Lessons by Eavan Boland

The way to the past is never smooth. For a woman poet it can be especially tortuous. Every step towards an origin is also an advance towards a silence. The past in which our grandmothers lived and where their lives burned through detail and incidence to become icons for our future is also a place where women and poetry remain far apart.

* * *

It's raining now, and it rained all night. I woke and slept and woke and slept to the click of drops on roof and window. Cloud and darkness still weight the earth; I barely glimpse the shadows of trees and sky. The invisible day is a blanket snugged around my lamplit room as the slow water sluices down and down among the stones and roots.

* * *

I Stop Writing the Poem

to fold the clothes. No matter who lives
or who dies, I’m still a woman.

--Tess Gallagher