St. Brigid's Day Poem

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