The Oscar Wilde House at 1 Merrion Square in 1967 (photographer: Elinor Wiltshire; credit: National Library of Ireland)

I drafted this poem a few days after meeting up with Eavan Boland for a happy lunch and walk in Dublin between Christmas and New Year’s 2018, and revised it over the next year or so. It felt elegiac then. And now it is an elegy of sorts. I’m grateful to the Los Angeles Review for publishing it about six weeks after she died–but I would so much rather it were still in a folder and she were still here. I will never stop missing her.

“On Merrion Street”