Daughters of Colony

From "Colony"

Daughters of parsons and of army men.

Daughters of younger sons of younger sons.

Who left for London from Kingstown harbour—

never certain which they belonged to.

Who took their journals and their steamer trunks.

Who took their sketching books.

Who wore hats

made out of local straw

dried in an Irish field beside a river which

flowed to a town they had known in childhood,

and watched forever from their bedroom windows,

framed in the clouds and cloud-shadows,

the blotchy cattle and

the scattered window lamps of a flat landscape

they could not enter.

Would never enter.

I see the darkness coming.

The absurd smallness of the handkerchiefs

they are waving

as the shore recedes.

I put my words between them

and the silence

the failing light has consigned them to:

I also am a daughter of the colony.

I share their broken speech, their other-whereness.

No testament or craft of mine can hide

our presence

on the distaff side of history.

See: they pull the brims of their hats

down against a gust from the harbour.

They cover

their faces with what should have been

and never quite was: their home.

---(c) Eavan Boland. All rights reserved.