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Atlantis — A Lost Sonnet by Eavan Boland

By T.

1 November 2011

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Atlantis — A Lost Sonnet
Eavan Boland

How on earth did it happen, I used to wonder
that a whole city—arches, pillars, colonnades,
not to mention vehicles and animals—had all
one fine day gone under?

I mean, I said to myself, the world was small then.
Surely a great city must have been missed?
I miss our old city—

white pepper, white pudding, you and I meeting
under fanlights and low skies to go home in it. Maybe
what really happened is

this: the old fable-makers searched hard for a word
to convey that what is gone is gone forever and
never found it. And so, in the best traditions of

where we come from, they gave their sorrow a name
and drowned it.

MARGINALIA

Hello, November.

ABOUT EAVAN BOLAND

Eavan Boland was born in Dublin on September 24, 1944. Boland’s poetry collections include A Poet’s Dublin (Carcanet Press, 2014); A Woman Without a Country (W. W. Norton, 2014); New Collected Poems (W. W. Norton, 2008); An Origin Like Water: Collected Poems 1967–1987 (W. W. Norton, 1996); and In Her Own Image (Arien House, 1980). Boland’s awards include a Lannan Foundation Award in Poetry, an American Ireland Fund Literary Award, a Jacob’s Award for her involvement in… (more)