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“This Moment” by Eavan Boland
Poetry 180: A Poem a Day for American High Schools, Hosted by Billy Collins, U.S. Poet Laureate, 2001-2003

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This Moment

A neighbourhood.
At dusk.

Things are getting ready
to happen
out of sight.

Stars and moths.
And rinds slanting around fruit.

But not yet.

One tree is black.
One window is yellow as butter.

A woman leans down to catch a child
who has run into her arms
this moment.

Stars rise.
Moths flutter.
Apples sweeten in the dark.

—Eavan Boland

from In a Time of Violence, 1994
W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., New York, NY

Copyright 1994 by Eavan Boland.
All rights reserved.

Reprinted by permission of W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. from In a Time of Violence. Copyright 1994 by Eavan Boland. For further permissions information, contact W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110.

Poetry 180

About the Poet

Eavan Boland (1944- ) was born in Dublin, Ireland in 1944. The daughter of a diplomat and a painter, Boland spent her girlhood in London and New York, returning to Ireland to attend secondary school in Killiney and later university at Trinity College in Dublin. She is the author of numerous poetry collections, including A Woman Without a Country: Poems (W. W. Norton, 2014).

Learn more about Eavan Boland at The Poetry Foundation.