We came to anchor beyond memory,
standing on gradual reddish tiles
flaming back at a low red sun:
if this were indeed a room,
if the universe is paved with it,
all over into gold, the light-sprinkled
hall folded the sky up like a scroll.

Even the window-blind was not
a simple muslin blind, but a painted
fabric-roof that permitted twilight
though the sun furnished the day,
with a design of castles, and gateways,
and groves of trees and several peasants
taking a winter-bright walk.

To see his home put before me
was to hold a lighted match
inside my hand, a spray of red
berries in an opal pin in my coat.
My dusk was noonday and the day
without evening, for he was all
daylight and his own repose.

To find him truly at his leisure
within his today, his governing lifetime,
was some living-apart-together
like the boom of a warmed Atlantic
at the very tip of the Bosphorous.
My earth-imbalanced voice
posted a sentry before my lips

that snapped it like a spell
after he had found it,
a world to stretch the remotest
fibres of his senses in,
that could grow without changing,
its virtues wandering alone,
but extending their arms forever.

It was not to get the heavens
into his head I put my question
to the earth, that has at its heart
a collision. He no longer lays
his ears to the weapon of my lips,
(and he cannot lay his ear to my heart)
but with the lips of the spirit, sparkling, he drinks.

Medbh McGuckian was born in 1950 in Belfast where she lives with her family. Her collections include The Face of the Earth and The Book of The Angel (The Gallery Press). Among the prizes she has won are: the British National Poetry Competition, the Forward Prize for Best Poem (2003), the American Ireland Fund Literary Award and, most recently, a major Northern Ireland Arts Council Award.