Third Annual Brigid in Cyperspace Poetry Slam

Blessed Imbolc to you!

Today is the day we witches celebrate the clear movement towards Spring that we've made since Yule. The sun gets up earlier, stays up later, shines a stronger and different quality of light upon us these days. On Imbolc, we honor the Goddess Brigid, a goddess of the fire of inspiration, the well of creativity, of smithcraft and of poetry.

Reya started, and Deborah Oak has continued, a great new tradition: blogging poetry on Imbolc to honor Brigid. And, so, in between getting ready for a houseful of witches this evening, spending some silent time at my own altar, and standing in a sweater on the porch, letting the firey sun shine through my closed eyelids, I'll share a few of the poems that I love.

Hail, Brighid, the Bright. Hail and Welcome!

St. Francis And The Sow

The bud
stands for all things,
even those things that don't flower,
for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;
though sometimes it is necessary
to reteach a thing its loveliness,
to put a hand on the brow
of the flower
and retell it in words and in touch
it is lovely
until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing;
as St. Francis
put his hand on the creased forehead
of the sow, and told her in words and in touch:
blessings of earth on the sow, and the sow
began remembering all down her thick length,
from the earthen snout all the way
through the fodder and slops to the spiritual curl of
the tail,
from the hard spininess spiked out from the spine
down through the great broken heart
to the blue milken dreaminess spurting and shuddering
from the fourteen teats into the fourteen mouths sucking
and blowing beneath them:
the long, perfect loveliness of sow.

Galway Kinnell