Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
GUANTE: Representing Watershed High School, this is
Gwendolen Austin.
(applause)
GWENDOLEN AUSTIN: Domestic Violence By Eavan Boland
It was winter, lunar, wet. At dusk
Pewter seedlings became moonlight orphans.
Pleased to meet you meat to please you
said the butcher's sign in the window in the village.
Everything changed the year that we got married.
And after that we moved out to the suburbs.
How young we were, how ignorant, how ready
to think the only history was our own.
And there was a couple who quarreled into the night,
Their voices high, sharp: nothing is ever entirely
right in the lives of those who love each other.
In that season suddenly our island
Broke out its old sores for all to see.
We saw them too. We stood there wondering how
the salt horizons and the Dublin hills,
the rivers, table mountains, Viking marshes
we thought we knew had been made to shiver
into our ancient twelve by fifteen television
which gave them back as gray and grayer tears
and killings, killings, killings,
then moonlight-colored funerals:
nothing we said not then, not later,
fathomed what it is is wrong in the lives of those
who hate each other. And if the provenance of memory
is only that-remember, not atone-
and if I can be safe in the weak spring light in that
kitchen, then why is there another kitchen,
spring light always darkening in it and
a woman whispering to a man over and over what else could
we have done? We failed our moment or our
moment failed us. The times were grand in size
and we were small. Why do I write that
when I don't believe it? We lived our lives, were happy,
stayed as one. Children were born and raised
here and are gone,
including ours. As for that couple did we ever
find out who they were and did we want to?
I think we know. I think we always knew.