mary Pound De Rachewiltz Poem by Kevin Kiely

Fresh and unfussed you came from Brunnenberg
in the Alps, to lecture at Maynooth
for the Gerard Manley Hopkins Summer School
your father never owned a book of his poems
finding the metrical labours ‘unduly touted'.

The theatre seated less than fifty and afterwards
you showed your translation of the Cantos
into Italian in a boxed edition.
A crowd huddled around, you smiled
and tucked up your head proudly
‘And do they cohere? '

What about his years of incarceration?
‘Ezra was, (you admitted)
a bad boy and had to pay
his debt to society.'
But the head shifted, the jaw turned on line
with your shoulder, as you signed
the bulky tome below your name
adding ‘daughter - translator'

Then a lecturer said
‘there was only one Ezra Pound'
and someone mumbled
‘One was enough.'