Hello, readers, and welcome to another weekly Pick-a-Poem post. Every Wednesday we feature a new poem on the blog, hoping that you’ll enjoy a bit of poetry injected into your day and perhaps find something new to read. These poems come from the oh-so helpful Poetry Daily, a site that features a new poem every single day. This week we’re featuring Passing Palmers Green Station by Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin.
According to her bio page on Poetry Daily, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin has had eight volumes of her work published, including Selected Poems (2009), The Sun-fish (2010), and The Legend of the Walled-Up Wife (2012), which consisted of translations from the Romanian poetry of Ileana Malancioiu. She currently edits the literary journal Cyphers with two other editors. Previously, she was Associate Professor of English, Dean of the Faculty of Arts (Letters), and a Fellow of Trinity College Dublin until she retired in 2011.
Passing Palmers Green Station by Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin
The train flies through the station; and here is where
for years I would step down to the platform
and climb up the long stairway to the road.
On it goes, past that other station,
where my mother lost one shoe in the gap, coming back
from the hospital where she’d left her younger daughter
among the dying. My weight on the same ground,
the rails and the overhead wires the same,
the labours of the bones. The train dips
under the ground, and for the last stage
of this journey I am close to them, to the gap
that resembles the dark side of the moon in Ariosto,
where Astolfo flew on the hippogriff, and discovered
that everything lost on the earth can again be found.
I hope you enjoyed this week’s featured poem! For more of these, click this link.
— Jet Fuel Blog Editor, Mary Egan
