July in Sligo

It's rained every day I've been here, but I understand it; if it had rained every day I was in France I wouldn't understand, I would have thought I was in the wrong place, and wanted to be elsewhere.

And even if I'm homesick in Ireland, reading of the Republican and Democratic conventions in The Irish Times, I'm homesick in a language I understand, able to listen to men visiting Ireland, who live in different countries in Europe-Denmark, England, Germany, all saying the situation is the same in all western democracies: that the distance between the rich and the poor is now greater and greater and that the poor have almost no one to represent them.

In Sligo they've made an industry of the poet, Yeats. Yeats is everywhere, on the sides of buildings, in hotel lobby's, on buses, in lecture halls and seminars, in guided tours to Lough Gill and Innisfree. Yeats is inescapable, the poet of the past, present, and future.

The rain falls and falls in Sligo in late July; the beautiful little river Garavogue accepts the rain, and time past, present and future becomes water, if it becomes anything at all.