Long ago
I was a child in a strange country:
I was Irish in England.
I learned
a second language there
which has stood me in good stead:
the lingua franca of a lost land.
A dialect in which
what had never been could still be found:
that infinite horizon. Always far
and impossible. That contrary passion
to be whole.
This is what language is:
a habitable grief. A turn of speech
for the everyday and ordinary abrasion
of losses such as this:
which hurts
just enough to be a scar.
And heals just enough to be a nation.
Eavan Boland