BRIGID OF NAMES: A
TRIPARTITE LIFE
I
Breeda, Bridey, Bridge-it: Those eedjit Sassenach
never could wrap their thick
Bearla around our sweet teanga.
Once I was Bree-id, but I
bridle at being called Bridie,
so undignified. Then they
called me a Bride of Christ.
I, who was God-ness far
beyond the Scythian Sea
I was every maiden, every
bride and every crone.
In the Isle of the Blesséd,
the Túatha Dé called me Brigantia
and gladly I gave my warrior
cry to them,
for were they not my
children?
Now brigantine corrupts my
line.
In the beginning I was the
triune Brí-ed,
but men from the east
stripped me of my sisters: I was reduced to
Brighid of the healing, whom
midwives and mothers beseeched,
Brighid of the Goibniu, who
fanned the forge with her sweet breath.
And I, the anvil of poetry,
wrote the ranna into the
numbering of years,
I was christened Naomh Brighid for my deeds.
But they drove my Túatha Dé
underground, calling them sídhe—faeries.
Up
the airy mountain, down the rushy glen
we
durna go a huntin’ for fear of little men
Wee
folk, good folk trooping all together
Green
jacket, red cap and white owl’s feather.
They
took little Brigit for seven years long...
I was reduced to a faery, a
mortal and a saint in one blow.
Poor Brigid Cleary, reduced
to ashes by a husband who thought her a changeling.
Her only crime—a bad
cough—but it was an unusually damp winter in 1889...
but that’s another story.
I was born at the atha between
worlds, betwixt night and dawn,
neither within nor without
the house, ní an thigh ní an
rígh.
The Daghda, the Good God, he
was my áthair,
who was my máthair? Bóand of the Cows? Or Dana? I never knew.
Dana whose rivers adorned
continents. Dnipr, Dienster, Don, Danube.
They say I was a fussy
child, drinking only bainne from
the red-eared cow.
I was wed a while to Bres,
but he was a half-Fomorii from beyond the sea...
more interested in playing
the Cattle of Tethra, his blasted fish, instead of me.
I watched our three sons
fall, blessed by the song of the sword.
It was I who keened the
first sorrow ever to face Éire.
I wanted them beside me, not
in the land of the ever-young. Tír na n-Óg.
Caesar, in love with the
scheme of things,
called me his little
Minerva, making me patron of arts and crafts,
but he, with his silly interpretatia never guessed
I was the fire Sulis, and
her sisters of the lost names.
Greine Bélsima (most brilliant I was). The very heart of the
sun.
Then, from across the sea
they came with their tonsures and Latin learning,
reduced my Féis Dé, to Candlemas,
but I was still a woman of sudden flame.
Nothing could susume me. I
was simply present in the beginning of language
for my name simply means goddess,
goddess, goddess.
Ah, Imbolc, the sweet milking for the lambs on the first day of Earrach.
It was I who divided the
year into lovers: Samhain and Gemredh. (fall and summer)
In the first paragraph of
paradise, I was shaper of the land, the consort of kings.
II BRIGIT AS MORTAL
In the first year of the
plagues, Cogitius the monk scribed:
to a mortal slave she was
born, swathed in a druid’s ráth
on the Curragh.
I was thrice-born in the
sweet land of Medbh, intoxicating queen of honeyed thighs.
I was born at Cú Chulainn’s
menhir where he faced his final hour,
where my sister, the
Mórrígan,was the war-raven tasting his eyes.
To appease his jealous wife,
my dark father, Dubthach,
sold me to a king who
thought me too worthy a wife
when I gave away his sword,
chariot, horses, and treasury...
With my mantle, I claimed
the whole of the Curragh
that land where as a girl I
raced my chariot against the wind,
I claimed it to grass the
cattle of the poor.
Milk overflowed in my
fields. I bettered the sheep, I satisfied the birds.
For the night I was born,
three cows gave birth at once
in the kitchen of the milk
god.
It’s true, in the mortal
coil, I refused marriage, even to the filidh
who couldn’t take a joke and
fled like an omen hare
when my eye burst like a
meteor on my cheek. Ach, it was only in jest.
Before battling with
goddesses, remember the poem is better than any lord.
The lepers and the blind
loved me, for my holy wells healed their maladies.
My little speckled fish
wagged his tail, restored sight and prophecy.
St. Brendan of Tra Lí, with
thoughts always to the sea,
who preferred its music to
that of the harp,
stayed in his blue martyrdom
seven long years.
No one to cure my headaches,
or to tell me tales of leviathan isles,
where he unwittingly said
Easter mass on the back of a whale,
how it shrugged him off when
he tried to build a fire.
Over
the wave-voice of the strong-maned sea
and
over the mouths of the marvelous, bitter ocean...
multitudes
of furious red-mouthed monsters chased him.
He told me of The Land of
Promise, an isle of mice, a paradise of birds,
and stories of crystal
columns, and lost cities of glass beneath the foam,
and of ships in adrift in
the sky, dropping anchor on some steeple below.
And the mayhem that followed
when he climbed down the chain for a closer look.
My Forever Navigator, he
tried to hang his wet cloak upon sunbeams like me.
My jealous brother, born
between the salt water and the sea strand,
claimed the beasts of the
sea loved me better. He was right, you know.
I gentled mad horses and
soothed the voices of the waves.
They say I never crossed
seven furrows without thinking of God.
I simply never took my mind
off her.
With seven sisters, they say
I built monasteries beneath the oaks.
But the oaks, not the
churches, were my temple.
Even Column Cille loved his
oaks. I came to him as a bird and sang.
Did they not know Cill
Dara was already mine own?
From the time the earth took
me back into her womb
until the dubhgaill pirates
came in longships from the north
I was smuggled to Dún
Pádraig with himself and Colum Cille,
for 500 years we three slept
together, blissfully forgotten.
No separation of marrow from
bone.
We had but one heart and one
mind.
I sleep but my heart
waketh.
On the eve of Invasion, it
was Maolachi who found us...
Dear Cormac in his Glossary
penned that as a saint I usurped “a goddess
whom the bards worshipped,
for great and noble was my perfection.”
He was right, you know,
Briga is the word for Goddess.
Nineteen of my cailleacha kept my fires lit with their sweet breath
Brigit guard your fire,
the next night belongs to you, they
always said.
I left a footprint in the
ashes as a token of my affection.
In the 1200th year of Our
Lord, Normans doused that fire and my 10,000 nuns wept.
That Welsh monk Gerald
scryed there was a matter of a hedge no man could cross.
Hmmf! Plenty of men came to
visit me, let me tell you.
The only thing that drove
them mad was their silly fear of desire.
Hairy-psalmed men moved by
soft Latin and flagellation never interested me.
Three sons I had: and they
claimed me a virgin! What were they thinking?
I sent the kestrel to the spires
of Kildare when her breeding was done
to mock them. Let them breed
in someone else’s parish.
And that bit about the nuns:
as if I needed prompting to mind my own fire!
Neither Gerald nor Cormac
never recognized me as their own St. Ffraid.
It wasn’t Ibor who conferred
me to the veil—history has it wrong—
it was Mel, so intoxicated
by my presence,
that he read the ritual for
ordaining a bishop over me. Bishop Brigit,
second only to Ticfa Pádraig; I kept my monks supplied in food and beer.
Silly things drank my bath
water from Maundy Thursday to Low Sunday
before they realized it
wasn’t ale. They, who called me Mary of the Gael
were clean mad to drink
anything if it were blessed—even bog water.
Everything I put my hand to,
received a threefold increase.
Churning, spinning, weaving
were at my board. Brigit of the braziers.
Once I fed the dog the
bishop’s dinner; and the meat was back on the bone by supper.
The multitudes I fed from
that same haunch! Go leor: plenty
and enough at my board.
But a sleighty fox stole the
bone so I sent him packing to trouble a king’s court
to beg for tricks like a
hound for a year and a day.
As a child, my hands charmed
three yields of milk from my cows,
and the butter! I once
filled the dairy with it to impress a stranger
who was horrified at the
sight of a mountain of butter.
But to the vain woman
bearing me wizened gifts of pride-apples,
I gave her fruitless trees
as a small token of my gratitude.
How she eagerly watched the
blossoms set to fruit each spring
only to ripen into husks,
like herself. Crone!
How I miss my little bishop,
Conleth, the metal-smith, falsely accused
of fathering a child, but it
was Brón, (sorrow’s patronage abused.)
I bade the newborn speak the
name of his father.
Brón Trogain, he mewed. Earth’s sorrow.
Did I not reside over His
birth, did my sisters not nurse the Holy Child,
he who was to come, the
triune God, the Son and the Father, all in one,
who was three in one, and
one in three, a trinity like my sisters Bríd and me?
III
Know you that at the red
hand of Ireland
I have been resurrected in
the third age, a woman
without name, reborn in the
fire of the last phrase of the millennium,
while child soldiers
slouching on street corners, defend blood faith,
and the alien Bearla is now our sweet foreign tongue.
The Navigator Poet saying, Read
the hand, read the hand...
In Ulster and Killdare, I
sleepeth but my heart waketh.
I, who made Patrick’s
shroud, who will read mine
when the last paragraph of
paradise unfolds its wings?
