'The Words Collide' by Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin

Written by Dublin-based poet and scholar Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, this poem comes from her powerful recent collection, The Boys of Bluehill.

The Words Collide has been placed last in the main section of the book, perhaps signifying the poem’s reach and resonance.

The Words Collide

The scribe objects. You can’t put it like that,I can’t write that. But the clientis a tough small woman forty years old.She insists. She needs her letterto open out full of pleated revolving silkand the soft lobes of her earswhere she flaunts those thin silver wires.

She wants to tell her dream to the only onewho will get the drift. How she saw their children lyingevery one dressed out in their simplest fears. They glowed,the shape of their sentence outlined in sea green.Among those beloved exilesone sighed happy, as a curtainlightened and the grammar changed, and the wallshowed pure white in the shape of a bird’s wing.

But when she whispered it to the scribe he frownedand she saw she had got it wrong, she had cometo a place where they all spoke the one language:it rose up before her like a quay walldraped in sable weeds. He said,You can’t put those words into your letter.It will weigh too heavy, it will cost too much,it will break the strap of the postman’s bag,it will crack his collarbone. The bridgesare all so bad now, with that weight to shifthe’s bound to stumble. He’ll never make it alive.