The Young See Age as Old-Fashioned — National Poetry Month

The Young See Age as Old-Fashioned

Somewhere, say, between a moral failure
And an avoidable foible. If the old fools
Just took the trouble to go to the gym... When you're hale
You're hearty enough to fear, far-off
The little puff: the black silencer
Screwed to the barrel of the future,
Short or long as that may prove. The furtive
Earwig of the unconventional cell,
Slick of lymph leaking out, in answer,
Or, nicer, surely, the shy embolism
Ambling through those precincts of familiarity,
The old elm-lined neighborhoods of the cerebrum,
Or—much better!—battering the chest like the old D-train
Taking its tunnel: whump.
All this is just imagining the actuarial worst.
Not age, which often comes first.

by Richard Kenney
courtesy Poetry Daily

National Poetry Month: A Woman Without A Country

Thanks to Poetry Daily for this unsettling, gorgeous poem.

A Woman Without A Country

As dawn breaks he enters
A room with the odor of acid.
He lays the copper plate on the table.
And reaches for the shaft of the burin.
Dublin wakes to horses and rain.
Street hawkers call.
All the news is famine and famine.
The flat graver, the round graver,
The angle tint tool wait for him.
He bends to his work and begins.
He starts with the head, cutting in
To the line of the cheek, finding
The slope of the skull, incising
The shape of a face that becomes
A foundry of shadows, rendering —
With a deeper cut into copper —
The whole woman as a skeleton,
The rags of  her skirt, her wrist
In a bony line forever
                                severing
Her body from its native air until
She is ready for the page,
For the street vendor, for
A new inventory which now
To loss and to laissez-faire adds
The odor of acid and the little,
Pitiless tragedy of  being imagined.
He puts his tools away,
One by one; lays them out carefully
On the deal table, his work done.

by Eavan Boland