Eva Bourke
Eva Bourke Poems
If I had one wish it would be
to have been born two or three
hundred years earlier in Japan.
...
At the station, newspapers, hot
coffees, the metallic smell of departure, the larks
strike their notes, glitzy
overtones from on high after night rain.
...
In the Trans-Alpine struggling uphill to Brennero
our compartment door kept sliding open
and shut again with a small click: the day outside
had trained its wide-angle lens on us.
...
The train made strides on fiery tracks.
Second stop: a melancholy Woodlawn
weeping birches
the sombre organization of spruce.
...
of water and paints a winding road by the sea
a blue-slated house with a narrow green
stair case and a window sill on which two apples
and three oranges lavish
...
'...deeper than did ever plummet sound//
I'll drown my book.'
Prospero in The Tempest. Shakespeare
Act V Scene 1
...
Wo Licht ist, ist Werden.
Schelling
The oak panel leaning on the easel faces away from view -
a tilted upper case Alpha. As always
...
with apologies to Montale
Gales that played wild and loose all night
with rubbish in the street and flung plastic
forks like confetti round the garden have died
...
According to Lichtenberg
only very few people have ever seen a pure white.
L.Wittgenstein
...
What's beneath the chemicals - gold
chloride, gum Arabic - the gloss,
the yellowish cardboard mount on which
the signature is scrawled?
...
Eva Bourke Biography
Eva Bourke is an Irish poet. Bourke was born in Germany but has lived for much of her life in Galway, Ireland. She studied German Literature and History of Art at the University of Munich. She has had five volumes of her own work published, as well as publications as editor and translator. She is a member of Aosdána. She was editor of the Writing in the West supplement of the Connacht Tribune for six years, and for over a decade has participated in the Galway Writer's Workshop. She lectures on contemporary Irish poetry in Austria, Hungary, Germany, the United States and Ireland. As of 2011, she is editing a German translation of a collection of the poet Friedrich Hoelderlin.)
The Best Poem Of Eva Bourke
Snow Story
If I had one wish it would be
to have been born two or three
hundred years earlier in Japan.
I'd adopt a new name:
Banana Tree or Blue Ink Pot,
or even Cup of Tea
and talk to crickets and swallows
knowing that the Milky Way
was reflected in their eyes, too.
I might take to the road,
the one to the Deep North
or live in seclusion complaining of too many visitors.
I would study how a tree
stands for itself and nothing else
and try to learn from it.
I'd teach important things
like ideograms, meaning "polite frog"
or "snail climbing Mount Fuji"
and on my wanderings fix my broken sandal thongs
or tears in my knapsack,
listening to the small songs of the insects.
At the end of my life I might find myself alone
living in a grain store with snow
falling through holes in the roof.
Eva Bourke Comments
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1/17/2026 12:22:44 AM # 1.0.0
