Poem for St Brigid’s Day: A Song at Imbolc

Now at spring’s awakening, short days are lengthening

and after St. Bridget’s Day. I’ll set my sail.

A blind man, on a stone bridge in Galway

or the road to Loughrea, felt the sun’s rays

Jeanine Cummins: ‘I didn’t know if I had the right to tell the story’

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Marian Keyes: Am I ever going to feel like a grown-up?

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Little Faith by Nickolas Butler is this Saturday’s Irish Times Eason offer

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‘A unique history of our island through its people, warts and all’

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in his bones again and praised the sycamore and oak,

crops still drowsy in the seed, wheat, flax and oats.

His song rising, he praised Achill’s eagle, Erne’s hawk

and in beloved Mayo, young lambs, kids, foals,

and little babies turning towards birth.

Blind Raftery invoked Bridget, Ceres of the North,

born into slavery at Faughart, near Dundalk

to an Irish chieftain and a foreign slave.

Why, of all small girls in so distant a century born

is she honoured still, in place-names, constant wells,

new rushes plaited to protect hearth, home, and herd?

Bridget, goddess, druidess of oak, or saint - a girl

who gifted her father’s sword to a beggar for bread,

we, who have wounded the engendering seas and earth,

beg you to teach us again, before it grows too late,

your neglected, painstaking arts of nature and of care.

Moya Cannon’s latest collection is Donegal Tarantella (Carcanet). Her poem was commissioned by Galway 2020 to mark the beginning of spring this St Bridget’s Day.