Eavan Boland - Jan 24, Iyengar Sunday Fun

From a very well respected contemporary Irish woman who spent years living between Dublin and Palo Aalto, where she was a professor at Stanford. Sadly, she passed away in the early part of 2020. Beautiful words with a fierce eye of history/her-story! I loved the appreciation for everyday yet profound silence, before the coming storm.

THE JUST USE OF FIGURES

Silence was a story, I thought,

on its own and all to itself. Then

the storm came. It came to us

with bulletins, forecasts, data,

each coordinate warning us

the doors of the ocean were open

to a wind with an appetite f

or roadside bins, roofs,

treetops, the painted henhouse

made to stop foxes that blew away

as lightly as the hat the woman failed

to hold on to as she walked past

Stephen's Green, a sudden gust

catching it: wood and wire mesh

that had once sheltered hands

as they warmed to new eggs

on a winter morning now

stirred into flight over fences

and scoured grass.

Hours earlier

it was quiet in the garden.

The pigeons we were used to

hearing all morning were all gone.

Outside the window it seemed

a space had opened, an emptiness.

I knew then what I wanted

to write was not storms

or wet air, it was something

else: it was metaphor and yet

what was made for language

when language cannot carry

meaning failed here. Instead

I learned in the hushed garden

before the wind rose what

I needed to know. Silence told the story.