Here is a glass of water from my well.
It tastes of rock and root and earth and rain;
It is the best I have, my only spell,
And it is cold, and better than champagne.
Perhaps someone will pass this house one day
To drink, and be restored, and go his way,
Someone in dark confusion as I was
When I drank down cold water in a glass,
Drank a transparent health to keep me sane,
After the bitter mood had gone again.

After the wolves and before the elms
the bardic order ended in Ireland.

Only a few remained to continue
a dead art in a dying land:

This is a man
on the road from Youghal to Cahirmoyle.
He has no comfort, no food and no future.
He has no fire to recite his friendless measures by.
His riddles and flatteries will have no reward.
His patrons sheath their swords in Flanders and Madrid.

Reader of poems, lover of poetry—
in case you thought this was a gentle art
follow this man on a moonless night
to the wretched bed he will have to make:

The Gaelic world stretches out under a hawthorn tree
and burns in the rain. This is its home,
its last frail shelter. All of it—
Limerick, the Wild Geese and what went before—
falters into cadence before he sleeps:
He shuts his eyes. Darkness falls on it.

We’re all born with our eyes closed to what we learn to be the world.
Our sounds begin with crying, our fingers bunched and curled.
We’re taught our eyes should open and our hands should follow suit.
Our lips we’re told to quiet, our lungs we’re taught to mute.
We’re taught rules are to be followed, enforced calmly with intent.
Our freedoms and our thoughts are forced and every feeling bent.
We grow into what we are made of and what we’re meant to be
These people born with their eyes closed now teaching us to see.
A potluck set of people and we’re told to pick just one
Forever and for always our individuality is undone
Over time it comes back around and soon we have to teach
Our own little entrées that bunched up hands can’t reach
Closed eyes are not able to watch and loud mouths don’t ever listen
We bend and break and force our little dishes until they glisten.
We age and rot and give up on what our hearts once dreamed
And dying we may realize that it’s not what it had seemed.
Saint Peter looks inside his book and asks us how we are
And crying with our eyes closed we ask our lucky stars
Why never in our lives we questioned what we were
Here we are at God’s front door and we finally concur
Hands bunched up and fingers curled, eyes shut and kept closed tightly
The world we lived on and left for here was horrid and unsightly.
Yet every morning we woke up and our eyes opened to the sun
We've been quietly observing a world that’s vastly overdone.

I'll always want to be like you
So smart, so strong, and tall
I'll always want to be like you
You're summer, I am fall
I'll always want to be like you
Today I found a flaw
I'll never want to be like you
Not who I thought at all

I wrung my hands under my dark veil. . .
"Why are you pale, what makes you reckless?"
-- Because I have made my loved one drunk
with an astringent sadness.

I'll never forget.  He went out, reeling;
his mouth was twisted, desolate. . .
I ran downstairs, not touching the banisters,
and followed him as far as the gate.

And shouted, choking: "I meant it all
in fun.  Don't leave me, or I'll die of pain."
He smiled at me -- oh so calmly, terribly --
and said: "Why don't you get out of the rain?"

Kiev, 1911