Most people I urge to write during this time dismiss the idea, or don’t register it as having any relevance to themselves. They aren’t “good enough,” they would say, or they aren’t “writers,”or their story isn’t interesting, or important, etc., etc. No matter how often I would urge, they could not see how whatever small contribution they might make would matter to anyone.
So I decided to make my point using the poem that introduced me to the Irish poet Eavan Boland who writes herself, as a woman, into the tangled historical and mythological history of Ireland. In this poem she comes upon the remnants of a famine road, so named because these roads were built by people dying of hunger during what is known as the Irish Potato Famine. History records the projects in various ways, the language of which will be the subject of a later post, but what Eavan Boland writes about is what is left out of the matter-of-fact recording of history. And it will be left out of the history that will be written of these times in the United States if ordinary people, people who do not think of themselves as writers, do not write what they see.
That the Science of Cartography is Limited
–and not simply by the fact that this shading of
forest cannot show the fragments of balsam,
the gloom of cypresses,
is what I wish to prove.
When you and I were first in love we drove
to the borders of Connacht
and entered a wood there.
Look down you said: this was once a famine road.
I looked down at ivy and the scutch grass
rough-cast stone had
disappeared into as you told me
in the second winter of their ordeal, in
1847, when the crop had failed twice,
Relief Committees gave
the starving Irish such roads to build.
Where they died, there the road ended
and ends still and when I take down
the map of this island, it is never so
I can say here is
the masterful, the apt rendering of
the spherical as flat, nor
an ingenious design which persuades a curve
into a plane,
but to tell myself again that
the line which says woodland and cries hunger
and gives out among sweet pine and cypress,
and finds no horizon
will not be there.
from In A Time of Violence