'Atlantis — A Lost Sonnet'
For her tenth book, Domestic Violence, Irish poet Eavan Boland turns to "the charged spaces in which people live, about the interiors where seductions, quarrels, memories, and griefs occur."
To mark National Poetry Month, NPR.org is featuring a series of newly published works selected by the Academy of American Poets. Learn more about this and other titles at the academy's New Spring Books list.
Atlantis — A Lost Sonnet
Eavan Boland
How on earth did it happen, I used to wonder
that a whole city — arches, pillars, colonnades,
not to mention vehicles and animals — had all
one fine day gone under?
I mean, I said to myself, the world was small then.
Surely a great city must have been missed?
I miss our old city —
white pepper, white pudding, you and I meeting
under fanlights and low skies to go home in it. Maybe
what really happened is
this: the old fable-makers searched hard for a word
to convey that what is gone is gone forever and
never found it. And so, in the best traditions of
where we come from, they gave their sorrow a name
and drowned it.
Books Featured In This Story
