“I am not thinking of Death, but Death is thinking of me.” So begins Mark Strand’s poem “2002,” which our students read this morning in preparation for an imitation exercise at Glasnevin Cemetery, Ireland’s first non-denominational cemetery, and the forever home of such Irish heroes and revolutionary heavy-hitters as Michael Collins, Charles Parnell, Constance Markievicz, Maud Gonne, and Éamon de Valera, among so many others–given that Glasnevin’s holdings are so great that Dublin’s dead population far outnumbers its living.

We toured a sampling of its most popular and historically significant gravesites, wrote poems personifying the figure of “death,” and finally, selected favorite gravestones and composed “indirections” back to the Glasnevin museum. In lieu of directional language (e.g. right/left, north/south, etc.), students were challenged to use thick description and curated landmarks to lead their reader back to square one. Here they are, exploring Dublin’s “dead centre”:

We can happily report that despite the 8 hour difference of US mountain time, students have largely sloughed off their jet lag, and are living on Irish time, whether it’s the hectic pace of O’Connell Street or the solemn stillness of Daniel O’Connell’s final resting place.