Hear by Eavan Boland

So high
in their leafy silence
over Kells, over Durrow,
as the Vickings
raged south --
the old monks
made the alphabet
wild:
they dipped iron
into azure and
indigo: they gave strange
wings to their os
and es: their vowels
clung on with
talons and the thin
rubber wolves
that had gone north
left their frozen winters
and were lured back
to their consonants.

-Eavan Boland