Always Books in your Room, Margaret

Yet the books will be there on the shelves, well born,
Derived from people, but also from radiance, heights.
– Czeslaw Milosz

Always books in your room, Margaret:
I met Chaucer at your bedroom door
years ago. While dodging school
we faced each other an hour or more –
his language a foreign place.

Always books in your room, Margaret:
Yeats and Kavanagh stayed behind
awhile when you went off to college,
bearing – they never seemed to mind –
the lack of direction in my face.

Always books in your room, Margaret:
the feeling I had on Sunday drives
when you were home was that we shared,
though silently, in countless lives
across the world and down the years.

Always books in your room, Margaret,
and, little by little, books in mine.
Like the suburbs lurking in Coughlan’s sandpit
when we were small, which, in time,
found language for their hopes and fears,

the suburbs growing in my head,
populated by the real, the dead,
the imaginary, understand they owe
a debt to you. And their wish, so:
always books in your room, Margaret.

from New and Selected Poems

By kind permission of the author and Dedalus Press