Two Poems

The Syllogism
by William Ellery Leonard 

All men are mortal. Death marks every zone,
His low white cities gleam in every land,
The king goes down with peasant hand in hand;
Death hath all earth, all seasons, for his own.

I am a man, somehow to stature grown,
Somehow (as all) with feet to walk the strand;
Somehow with eye to see and to command,
Somehow with heart to suffer all alone.

And I am mortal; I too must be gone,
From hill or meadow smit of flame and sky,
Or from the shadow with the shutter drawn–
And long a watcher of the stars am I,
A listener at the sea from dusk to dawn,
And need no schoolmen, Death, to prove it by.

Via.

The Necessity for Irony
by Eavan Boland

On Sundays,
when the rain held off,
after lunch or later,
I would go with my twelve year old
daughter into town,
and put down the time
at junk sales, antique fairs.

There I would
lean over tables,
absorbed by
lace, wooden frames,
glass. My daughter stood
at the other end of the room,
her flame-coloured hair
obvious whenever—
which was not often—

I turned around.
I turned around.
She was gone.
Grown. No longer ready
to come with me, whenever
a dry Sunday
held out its promises
of small histories. Endings.

When I was young
I studied styles: their use
and origin. Which age
was known for which
ornament: and was always drawn
to a lyric speech, a civil tone.
But never thought
I would have the need,
as I do now, for a darker one:

Spirit of irony,
my caustic author
of the past, of memory,—

and of its pain, which returns
hurts, stings—reproach me now,
remind me
that I was in those rooms,
with my child,
with my back turned to her,
searching—oh irony!—
for beautiful things.