2
Ballymacash
Lisburn
N.9
Friday
Dear Bill:
Thanks for the note. Was curious to hear your news.
Sorry about Murlough. But ????????
9 January, especially with Dylan.
Well, I'm working hard, in all sorts of ways.
Had a short elegy in last weeks Irish Times,
+ it's been praised by Joseph Hone, Yeats's biographer,
as the best poem in the I.T. for a long time. So I'm
beginning to fancy myself as a lyricist + have
swollen head. Here's a copy - it might interest you.
Death of an Old Woman
She'd no adventure in her life
neither in body nor in mind,
and after more than sixty years of wifehood,
her body dry as rind,
she died in the sun in May.
Throughout this long last winter she lay
patiently, with neither hope nor fear;
and nothing that we might say
meant anything to her seer-like
face, white as the ray
of light spearing the gay
