(After Eavan Boland)‍

‍

Once I had a book of thoughts
But somewhere between my 18th year
And the present
The landscape has been beaten
Beyond recognition.

Today I map my slipped thoughts
From darkness, an unwelcome fog,
And sew their curves and light
To a birth.

Once I stitch the parts –
Parts that have no ending
And that scarcely have a beginning –
I learn that words still have to run.‍

Breath blessed
I inhale
And sing again
A new anthem‍

This is my gift, this fractured verse of envy,
A schism of synaptic pulses,
These relics folded and unfolded in sheets of blank paper.

I christen a new dialect,
Half-silhouette on my tongue,
An absence of night,
But still a seed buried deeper than the earth,
A sound outside of distance.