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Contents | September 2001

In This Issue (Contributors)

More on poetry from The Atlantic Monthly.
The Atlantic Monthly | September 2001
 
Limits

by Eavan Boland
 
 .....
 
audioear pictureHear Eavan Boland read this poem (in RealAudio)


 So high
in their leafy silence
over Kells, over Durrow,
as the Vikings
raged south—
the old monks
made the alphabet
wild:
     they dipped iron
into azure and
indigo: they gave strange
wings to their os
and es: their vowels
clung on with
talons and the thin
ribbed wolves
that had gone north
left their frozen winters
and were lured back
to their consonants.

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Copyright © 2001 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All rights reserved.
The Atlantic Monthly; September 2001; Limits; Volume 288, No. 2; 52.
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