Crazy Sharon Talks to the Bishop
I met the Bishop on the road
and much said he – same old porridge
I heard as a child, my little body
a ‘foul sty.’ And what did he mean,
‘Love has pitched his mansion.’ Maybe Love
pitched her silken tent – or was built
around it. Love has raised its dwelling
in the place of reproduction, which can be
fitted with an excellent device
which functions as a saving grace.
And maybe everything can be rent,
everything can be sole or whole – like an
asshole. I met a Bishop, once,
when I was a teenager mad as hell about
eternal fire and birth control,
we were sitting in my mother’s living room,
I held out my fingers, and wiggled them at him,
and said ‘I’m trying to make you levitate.’
He was not holding his crook, or his mitred
hat, but he was wearing a shirt
of magenta Egyptian cotton, woven and
dyed only for Bishops, and I said,
thinking myself quite the witty brat,
‘That is the most beautiful shirt
I have ever seen, could you get me a shirt like that?’
Not seeing myself, the privilege
and ignorance of coming from a living room
like that. For I have built my poems in
the place of ignorant opulence.
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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