Tag Archives: Derek Mahon

Living with Yes/No – Prose by Guy Gavriel Kay, Poems by Mahon and Szymborska

She laughed aloud. It was good to feel laughter, to release it. To believe it was permitted. That many things might now, finally, be allowed. We are vulnerable when we feel that way. But not, in truth, any more than we live curtailed, held back, enraged, afraid. Everything is, indeed, always changing. And not usually […]

Turn Stones into Altars and Everything Is Going to Be All Right – The Wisdom of Irish Poets, Pádraig Ó Tuama and Derek Mahon

So let us pick up the stones over which we stumble, friends, and build altars. Let us listen to the sound of breath in our bodies. let us listen to the sounds of our own voices, of our own names, of our own fears. Let us name the harsh light and soft darkness that surround […]

No, Everything Is Not All Right! Irish Poet Derek Mahon (1941-2020) Dead at Seventy-Eight

Heraclitus on Rivers Nobody steps into the same river twice. The same river is never the same Because that is the nature of water. Similarly your changing metabolism Means that you are no longer you. The cells die, and the precise Configuration of the heavenly bodies When she told you she loved you Will not […]

Life: Beautiful or Monstrous or Both? Three Poems by Swir, Mahon and Gilbert

Poetry Reading I’m curled into a ball like a dog that is cold. Who will tell me why I was born, why this monstrosity called life. The telephone rings. I have to give a poetry reading. I enter. A hundred people, a hundred pairs of eyes. They look, they wait. I know for what. I […]

Happiness in a Broken World – Two Poems

                                    The fertility of the poetic mind! As my good friend and poet Liz commented to me today it is so surprising and wonderful the places a poet can be taken by an image. I had Liz’s comment […]