4d
LÁ FHÉILE BRIDE - SAINT BRIGID'S DAY
( for Noreen )
even Brigid's statue
protects the little birds
nestling behind her
and as a little garsún
wasn't it to the birds
I would pray
believing that Brigid
was releasing them
to Spring skies
*
St. Brigid's Garrison Church in the Curragh Camp where I was born...this statue was woven into the fabric of my childhood. Birds used to nest behind her wooden cloak. Her cross is the only cross I can bear and was a staple of every Irish home when my childhood was in full bloom. Great story of her going to ask the King for a bit of land to build a convent on and he laughed and said you can have as much as your cloak can cover. So being the good saint she was....she spread her cloak and it covered miles and miles. Never mess with a saint!
Of course it is also the beginning of Imbolc (pronounced 'im'olk')that good old Pagan festival if you are that way inclined.
An Irish word that was originally thought to mean 'in the belly' although many people translate it as 'ewe's milk' (oi-melc)all associated with the pregnancy of ewe and the giving of milk. The Curragh Plains are of course festooned with many many sheep so that made it all the more real for us.
It is a festival based on seasonal changes associated with the onset of lambing and the blooming of the Blackthorn.
She is the Goddess of among other things....those curious creatures we call....poets.
Indeed wasn't auld Jemmy de Joist born the very next day in the wake of her feast day and the days beginning to lengthend.
An old proverb from Scotland tells us....
Thig an nathair as an toll
Là donn Brìde,
Ged robh trì troighean dhen t-sneachd
Air leac an làir.
The serpent will come from the hole
On the brown Day of Bríde,
Though there should be three feet of snow
On the flat surface of the ground.
Spring has indeed been sprung from the depths of winter.
The Statue of St. Brigid & Children can be seen over the main entrance. The statue is eight feet in height and was carved in teak by the late Oisin Kelly who is best known for his The Children of Lir (1964) in the Garden of Remembrance,, Jim Larkin (1977) O'Connell Street and his Chariot of Life (1982) at the Irish Life Center.
And didn't auld Seamus give him a mention in his second "Glanmore Sonnet."
"'These things are not secrets but mysteries',
Oisin Kelly told me years ago
In Belfast, hankering after stone
That connived with the chisel, as if the grain
Remembered what the mallet tapped to know."
So from the wee buachaill I once was I could join the dots from statue to statue and all the way into a Heaney sonnet Brigid lore of yore.
( for Noreen )
even Brigid's statue
protects the little birds
nestling behind her
and as a little garsún
wasn't it to the birds
I would pray
believing that Brigid
was releasing them
to Spring skies
*
St. Brigid's Garrison Church in the Curragh Camp where I was born...this statue was woven into the fabric of my childhood. Birds used to nest behind her wooden cloak. Her cross is the only cross I can bear and was a staple of every Irish home when my childhood was in full bloom. Great story of her going to ask the King for a bit of land to build a convent on and he laughed and said you can have as much as your cloak can cover. So being the good saint she was....she spread her cloak and it covered miles and miles. Never mess with a saint!
Of course it is also the beginning of Imbolc (pronounced 'im'olk')that good old Pagan festival if you are that way inclined.
An Irish word that was originally thought to mean 'in the belly' although many people translate it as 'ewe's milk' (oi-melc)all associated with the pregnancy of ewe and the giving of milk. The Curragh Plains are of course festooned with many many sheep so that made it all the more real for us.
It is a festival based on seasonal changes associated with the onset of lambing and the blooming of the Blackthorn.
She is the Goddess of among other things....those curious creatures we call....poets.
Indeed wasn't auld Jemmy de Joist born the very next day in the wake of her feast day and the days beginning to lengthend.
An old proverb from Scotland tells us....
Thig an nathair as an toll
Là donn Brìde,
Ged robh trì troighean dhen t-sneachd
Air leac an làir.
The serpent will come from the hole
On the brown Day of Bríde,
Though there should be three feet of snow
On the flat surface of the ground.
Spring has indeed been sprung from the depths of winter.
The Statue of St. Brigid & Children can be seen over the main entrance. The statue is eight feet in height and was carved in teak by the late Oisin Kelly who is best known for his The Children of Lir (1964) in the Garden of Remembrance,, Jim Larkin (1977) O'Connell Street and his Chariot of Life (1982) at the Irish Life Center.
And didn't auld Seamus give him a mention in his second "Glanmore Sonnet."
"'These things are not secrets but mysteries',
Oisin Kelly told me years ago
In Belfast, hankering after stone
That connived with the chisel, as if the grain
Remembered what the mallet tapped to know."
So from the wee buachaill I once was I could join the dots from statue to statue and all the way into a Heaney sonnet Brigid lore of yore.
