Aisling Dhuibhneach 2002
(for Bab Feirtéar)
Blessed is the Indian summer;
Better still, the late harvest of words.
Golden is the reaping woman
Who scythes the treasured sunlight
At evening over Ard na Caithne.
She gathers the red flush of montbretia
From speckled ditches of the neighbourhood
She binds each bounty
Into sheaves of music
To keep you company by firelight,
To banish, for you, the frost of loneliness.
Don’t be backward about coming forward!
Fall to her stook of stories
Till your eyes water;
And when you taste old family grains
In the sweet cake of ancestral blessing
You will be filled to the brim
Like a cat of nine lives
Who made a harvest of the field mouse.
You were too long abroad
In the world of rough tongues,
A wretched little changeling
Who fled the whole system,
Here is the one less vocal
Who lives in the soul’s dazzling barn:
Stay in her orbit, where she’ll lead you
On the high roads of the word –
Across the threshold of silence
Where you will hear
The heartbeat and breath
And the harmony of what is.
.
.
by Bríd Ní Mhóráin
from Síolta an Iomais
publisher: Cló Iar-Chonnachta, Connemara, 2006,