Minnie

“Lines written for a thirtieth wedding anniversary


Somewhere up in the eaves it began:
high in the roof – in a sort of vault
between the slates and the gutter – a small leak.
Through it, rain which came from the east,
in from the lights and foghorns of the coast –
water with a ghost of ocean salt in it –
spilled down on the path below.
Over and over and over
years stone began to alter,
its grain searched out, worn in:
granite rounding down, giving way
taking into its own inertia that
information water brought, of ships,
wings, fog and phosphor in the harbour.
It happened under our lives: the rain,
the stone. We hardly noticed. Now
this is the day to think of it, to wonder:
all those years, all those years together –
the stars in a frozen arc overhead,
the quick noise of a thaw in the air,
the blue stare of the hills – through it all
this constancy: what wears, what endures.”
― Eavan Boland

“If you no longer live,
if you my beloved, my love,
if you have died,
all the leaves will fall in my breast,
it will rain in my soul night and day,
the snow will burn my heart,
I shall walk with frost and fire and death
and snow,
my feet will want to walk to where you
are sleeping, but
I shall live”
― Pablo Neruda

“History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.”
― Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

“For the sadness in legitimate humour consists in the fact that honestly and without deceit it reflects in a purely human way upon what it is to be a child.”
― Søren Kierkegaard