from Four Letters of Love by Niall Williams

It was then, lying there in the bed beside her sleeping husband, that Margaret Looney realised there was to be an emptying as much as a filling of her heart with love, and that as much as her heart had expanded and grown in the first girlish weeks of love in Donegal, filling her until bursting, now, in the years left, there was to be the slow drop by drop bleeding back of it all. It would all have to be given back, and day after day as the hardship of their life dulled into routine -- window panes that rattled under the lash of the wind for months on end, rain that leaked beneath the doors, her husband out and drinking, electricity cut off and the radio shut down, the boredom, the quiet and incredible loneliness -- Margaret Looney would remember when she first discovered love and wonder at how immense it must have been to be lasting so long.

from The Silent Scripture by Sebastian Barry

Some days later I was out on my porch, fussing over my roses. It was an activity that even in my distress brought a tincture of comfort. But then it is clear to me that any effort at gardening, even a haphazard, stop-go one such as mine was, is an effort to drag to earth the colours and the importances of heaven.

(Untitled) by laura morgan

Trying to figure it out.

Sitting at the kitchen table
trying to figure out what I have to show for all these years of living.

Mind ponders, and I peer across the sitting room.
Peer out the window
through hazy sheer
where
propane gas cylinders stand side by side
all sage green and rusty red on a truckbed

beautiful to me,
shocking white cautionary flammable gas warning and all.

All is quiet, and I sit, 
seized by the irony

of a life-sized still-life not wholey unlike my memories:
forty-six years of foggy recollections

caustic
and beautiful.

from The Secret Scripture by Sebastian Barry

By her own estimation, a plain woman, she did not wish to be a plain old woman. However I would also question her plainness. There were times when her face shimmered and flashed with its own beauty. There was the moment we stood side by side in the church, and I looked down at her face just the second before she said 'I do,' and then heard her say it, and then out of her face flew this extraordinary light, flooding up at me. It was love. You do not expect to see love like that. I did not anyhow.

from The Secret Scripture by Sebastian Barry

As usual I don't have words for what I mean. I am trying to say I loved Bet, yes, soul to soul, and the lines and wrinkles were part of some other story, her own harrowing reading of her own life.

from The Secret Scripture by Sebastian Barry

Even the grandees came to the pictures. ... It wasn't the church, but it was like the church, better, far better. It was at the pictures that you could look around and see that rapt gaze on people's faces that maybe the priest or the minister dreamed of one day seeing on the faces of their parishioners. The whole of Sligo in a damp crowd, all those different people and different degrees, paupers and princes, united by their enchantment. You could have said Ireland was united and free, at the pictures anyhow.

from The Secret Scripture by Sebastian Barry

My next thought was that she was being cagey because she feared me, or was even perhaps in dread of speaking, in case it led her back to things she would rather forget. Of course either way I know she has suffered enormously. You can see it in in her eyes as plain as day. It is actually what gives her her strange grace, if I may say that.