By Silbury
At the grey round of the hill
I walk in the snares of grass
By thistles as tall as me: the hill
Is herself. Between us, however, a barbed-
Wire fence gathers its wool.
I stop to take a photograph
And no number of these will snare
The music of the hill. My photograph
Dreams in its little machine:
Little coloured ghost of a photograph.
The world slips so easily away.
The thistle nods its heavy load.
The hooves have printed the bridleway.
I carry about with me a myriad of ghosts
And the hill knows they are running away.
The hill knows they are running like cows
At the sound of a gate through the evening air:
At the foot of her slope are the tiny cows
Stilled like a painting in the morning calm
While the stream-side oaks spray whorls of crows.
Poetry Ireland Review Issue 116:
A WB Yeats Special Issue
This essential Yeats anniversary publication is edited by Vona Groarke and includes responses to Yeats’s legacy and readings of his poems from public figures as diverse as Bill Whelan, Neil Jordan, Colm Tóibín, Frank McGuinness, Mary Costello and John Banville, along with new poems responding to Yeats’s work by Irish and international poets such as Margaret Atwood, Sharon Olds, Philip Schultz, Sinéad Morrissey and Harry Clifton. The issue also includes Yeats’s poetry collections, reviewed by leading poets as if just published. Now also available in hardback.
"superb special edition" John Boland, Irish Independent
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