Eavan Boland - Outside History lyrics

These are outsiders, always. These stars— these iron inklings of an Irish January, whose light happened thousands of years before our pain did; they are, they have always been outside history. They keep their distance. Under them remains a place where you found you were human, and a landscape in which you know you are mortal. And a time to choose between them. I have chosen: Out of myth in history I move to be part of that ordeal who darkness is only now reaching me from those fields, those rivers, those roads clotted as firmaments with the dead. How slowly they die as we kneel beside them, whisper in their ear. And we are too late. We are always too late.