On Merrion Street by Nan Cohen

for Eavan Boland

If I could cast you in bronze,
I wouldn’t—
not even so you might stand forever
in this city of monuments,

not even to add a particular woman
—not goddess, not nation—
to this country’s stock of heroes.

Not even to make permanent in a gesture
your heroic questioning. No abstraction.
Not even like the Moirai, the sisters of Fate,

who, displaying their terrible tools
modestly in their hands, are almost
expressionless, detached.

I would have you walking, here, as you are,
past Government buildings, past proclamations

and men’s arms folded or flung, in blessing or curse.
At home on this street, yet not of it,

particular as caress or rebuke, past
the abstract gesture’s certain lie.

Note: I only saw Eavan once in her native city, on my first visit there at the end of December 2018 with my husband and daughter. We met near Merrion Square, and I remember catching sight of her walking toward us in the shadow of Government buildings. In our few days in Dublin, each time I recognized a statue of one of Ireland’s heroes I thought of the way her poems interrogated Irish history, how she taught us to look beyond “iron orators and granite patriots” and past “those men raised/high above the certainties they stood on” (from “Unheroic” in The Lost Land) into the pain and loss of the past and the lives of women, past and present and future. I thought about how much she deserved acclaim and yet how incongruous it would be to mark her own achievement with any monument like those.

I haven’t fully grasped that she is gone, and yet I know her work is the monument that will endure long beyond any of us who love her now.

Nan Cohen is the author of two books of poetry, Rope Bridge and Unfinished City. The recipient of a Stegner Fellowship, a Rona Jaffe Writer’s Award and an NEA Literature Fellowship, she teaches at Viewpoint School and co-directs the poetry programs of the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference.