St Brigit's Day - A Time of Renewal

St Brigit's day marks the first Quarter Day of the year, a time of the first stirrings and awakenings of new life. Perhaps each renewal is a time for looking back to what has formed us and for questioning who we are.

Identities

Are you the language that you speak

or the one your parents spoke,

the one you never learned?

Are you the land you live in now

or the one that lives inside their bones,

the one that they call home?

Are you the kind of fruit you eat,

that prospers in this soil?

Are you the stories that your parents feed you

before they disappear,

a film of moist silt in your memory?

Or are you more a conduit, a colour

and a shape, a lightning-flash

that you hand on to others?

Mixing chalk and water with imagination,

are you vivid with light,

and warm too – with light?

Names fade it seems,

tossed out with the rind of mandarins,

lemons and pomegranates -

while what you live of sun

and stars – remains.

Morelle Smith

poem for St Brigit's day

ANGELS OF HEALING
for St Brigit’s day and Candlemas
Tessa Ransford (2011)

I open myself to the angels of healing
the greater or lesser, the arch or hermetic
wherever they may appear
with therapies or with silences
yet unsurely believable:
Gabriel, Michael, Raphael
who companioned Tobias
or whichever may be supposed
my guardian, a little Indian goddess?
Or shall I call Bride, our own goddess
of fire and light, of children and hearth
of kindness and practicality?

Angels know the world changes
all the time anyway and nothing
they do can change the endless
changing.

Are these the angels of healing who
pick up the broken bodies of those
they love and of strangers; Red Cross
workers, midwives and nurses,
Médecins sans Frontières;
bomb disposal experts, and those
who comfort the children, who gather
the minds and rejected feelings of all
who have tried to save and heal but have
been bereaved of hope?

Bride as midwife we pray you will
bring to birth
the light of the turning year
and assist the gestation of animals
plants and minerals,
riding the surf with your flock
of red-billed oyster catchers.

We pray you will
bear the child of the year in your arms
and, despite the anger that rages on,
we pray you will feed it the milk of human kindness
gathered where you may
out-poured where you can,
as you quietly allowed the Celtic church -
its hermits and insular saints
and we who humbly and blindly follow -
to change your flame from goddess to saint
your name to Brigit and to
number ourselves in your company.

I open myself to the angels of healing
and welcome the longed-for mother,
sister or nurse, in all manifestations,
her smile, her capable hands.