Thomas Kinsella

When we get up in the morning and look in the mirror, what do we see?

Here’s a poem by Thomas Kinsella (4 May 1928 – 22 December 2021), Irish poet, translator, editor, and publisher.

His poems since 1956, Kinsella once told an interviewer, have been “almost entirely lyrical—have dealt with love, death and the artistic act; with persons and relationships, places and objects, seen against the world’s processes of growth, maturing and extinction.”

Mirror in February

The day dawns, with scent of must and rain,
Of opened soil, dark trees, dry bedroom air.
Under the fading lamp, half dressed - my brain
Idling on some compulsive fantasy -
I towel my shaven jaw and stop, and stare,
Riveted by a dark exhausted eye,
A dry downturning mouth.

It seems again that it is time to learn,
In this untiring, crumbling place of growth
To which, for the time being, I return.
Now plainly in the mirror of my soul
I read that I have looked my last on youth
And little more; for they are not made whole
That reach the age of Christ.

Below my window the wakening trees,
Hacked clean for better bearing, stand defaced
Suffering their brute necessities;
And how should the flesh not quail, that span for span
Is mutilated more? In slow distaste
I fold my towel with what grace I can,
Not young, and not renewable, but man.

--Thomas Kinsella