St. Brigid’s Day
Prayer
Here
we lay our winter’s sorrow
for
the dark eye
and
from the source of the healer
we
find the milk of the white cow at Imbolc.
The
sheep are on the hill
and
it is bitterly cold
yet
basking in new lamb’s light
Meath
rises from genuflection.
Listening
to the land and the season
she
becomes deified. We pay homage
and
show appreciation for the return
of
what we love.
In
reverence
we
do not take for granted
the
mother’s blessing;
the
maturing and coming to fruition
of
the afterlife sown,
time
and again,
by
the waterwheel of the river
and
the miller’s trickling hands.
When
the wailing rain
bring
us to ruin
I
name you, I pronounce you
and
call you into existence
asking
she who is intrinsically one
that
we would have the strength
and
direction of one hundred
hurtling
birds in a storm.
Queen
of February come to us
now
that we are leaving
the
season of death behind,
fill
our branches once again.
In
the great stirring of bulbs and animals;
snowdrops,
daffodils and primroses,
foxes,
badgers and hares, all call your name –
O
Goddess, O holy woman!
Órla
Fay
