and not simply by the fact that this shading of <br />forest cannot show the fragrance of balsam, <br />the gloom of cypresses <br />is what I wish to prove. <br /> <br />When you and I were first in love we drove <br />to the borders of Connacht <br />and entered a wood there. <br />Look down you said: this was once a famine road. <br /> <br />I looked down at ivy and the scutch grass <br />rough-cast stone had <br />disappeared into as you told me <br />in the second winter of their ordeal, in <br /> <br />1847, when the crop had failed twice, <br />Relief Committees gave <br />the starving Irish such roads to build. <br /> <br />Where they died, there the road ended <br /> <br />and ends still and when I take down <br />the map of this island, it is never so <br />I can say here is <br />the masterful, the apt rendering of <br /> <br />the spherical as flat, nor <br />an ingenious design which persuades a curve <br />into a plane, <br />but to tell myself again that <br /> <br />the line which says woodland and cries hunger <br />and gives out among sweet pine and cypress, <br />and finds no horizon <br /> <br />will not be there. <br /> <br /> <br />Eavan Boland<br /><br />Eavan Aisling Boland<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/that-the-science-of-cartography-is-limited-2/
