Irish Poetry

LINES WRITTEN IN DEJECTION

by: W. B. Yeats (1865-1939)

http://www.poetry-archive.com/y/lines_written_in_dejection.html

WHEN have I last looked on

The round green eyes and the long wavering bodies

Of the dark leopards of the moon?

All the wild witches, those most notable ladies,

For all their broom-sticks and their tears,

Their angry tears, are gone.

The holy centaurs of the hills are vanished;

I have nothing but the embittered sun;

Banished heroic mother moon and vanished,

And now that I have come to fifty years

I must endure the timid sun.

Cold Morning by Eamon Grennan

Through an accidental crack in the curtain

I can see the eight o'clock light change from

charcoal to a faint gassy blue, inventing things

in the morning that has a thick skin of ice on it

as the water tank has, so nothing flows, all is bone,

telling its tale of how hard the night had to be

for any heart caught out in it, just flesh and blood

no match for the mindless chill that's settled in,

a great stone bird, its wings stretched stiff

from the tip of Letter Hill to the cobbled bay, its gaze

glacial, its hook-and-scrabble claws fast clamped

on every window, its petrifying breath a cage

in which all the warmth we were is shivering.