Brigid Poetry Festival, 2012

To honor the Goddess Brigid, patron of poets, healers, and midwives, I offer the lyrics to a song by Aimee Mann, "Jacob Marley's Chain" -

Well, today a friend told me this sorry tale
As he stood there trembling and turning pale
He said each day's harder to get on the scale
Sort of like Jacob Marley's chain

But it's not like life's such a vale of tears
It's just full of thoughts that act as souvenirs
For those tiny blunders made in yesteryear
That comprise Jacob Marley's chain

Well, I had a little metaphor to state my case
It encompassed the condition of the human race
But to my dismay, it left without a trace
Except for the sound of Jacob Marley's chain

Now there is no story left to tell
So I think I'd rather just go on to hell
Where there's a snowball's chance that the personnel
Might help to carry Jacob Marley's chain

Help to carry Jacob Marley's chain...

It might seem to be a strange choice, but I think it's a wonderful look at circumstance, and the possibility of escaping what might otherwise seem hopeless. In other words, healing.


You can listen to Aimee singing it here.

Brigid Poetry Festival

My contribution to the Sixth Annual Brigid Poetry Festival is from Eating in the Underworld, by Rachel Zucker.

Persephone by
Dante Gabriel
Rossetti

Note [Hades to Persephone]


   Spin to breathe.
   Only the still world passing
   as you flee reminds you to
   fill and empty lungs
   when you have forgotten
   how to blink.








Here's another...
And here are some more...

fourth annual Brigid in cyberspace poetry reading

Welcome to the fourth annual Brigid in Cyberspace Poetry Reading. Click the Triple Goddess for details and links...



Real Life - by Lucie Brock-Broido

Soon the electrical wires will grow heavy under the snow.
I am thinking of fire of the possibility of fire & then moving

Across America in a car with a powder blue dashboard,
Moving to country music & the heart

Is torn a little more because the song says the truth.
Because in the thirty-six things that can happen

To people, men & women, women & women,
Men & men, in all these things the soul is bound

To be broken somewhere along the line,
That clove-scented, air-colored wanderer blushing

With no memory, no inkling & then proceeds
Across America

In the sap green of the tropics,
Toward the cadmium of a bitter sunrise to a new age,

At the white impossible ice hour, starving,
Past the electric blue of the rivers melting down,

Above the nude, snuff, terra cotta, maybe fire,
Over the tiny fragile mound of finger bones

Of an Indian who died standing up,
Through the heliotrope of a song about the sunset,

To live the thirty-six things
& never comes home.

3rd Annual Brigid in Cyberspace Poetry Reading

Welcome to the Third annual Brigid in Cyberspace Poetry Reading. Click the Triple Goddess for details...





On a night of snow by Elizabeth Coatsworth

Cat, if you go outdoors, you must walk in the snow.
You will come back with little white shoes on your feet,
little white shoes of snow that have heels of sleet.
Stay by the fire, my Cat. Lie still, do not go.
See how the flames are leaping and hissing low.
I will bring you a saucer of milk like a marguerite,
so white and so smooth, so spherical and so sweet --
stay with me, cat. Outdoors, the wild winds blow.

Outdoors the wild winds blow, Mistress, and dark is the night,
strange voices cry in the trees, intoning strange lore,
and more than cats move, lit by our eyes' green light,
on silent feet where the meadow grasses hang hoar --
Mistress, there are portents abroad of magic and might,
and things that are yet to be done. Open the door!


___________________

Visit Moondrummer - Slow Dance
Vision Stalker - The Moments Between
Amazon Mink Knits - a Knitting Sonnet
Spring - Owl's Wings
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The Mog's Blog - Poem for Brigid