A
Charm for a Person Living With an Illness or Pain
Fiery
Brighid, shaper of stars,
Bear your hammer down upon this one’s suffering.
Turn your breath, glowing with poetry, upon their body
Let flaring pain recede like the glow of metal in the forge
Let the softest of your healing words rend pain into ash and sparks
Which, scattered upon the night, glow and are no more.
Let strength reside where pain once lived.
Merciful
Brighid, soft-handed
Pour your healing out upon this one
Sweet to the mouth and cooling to the throat as well-water
Let cracks of pain ease and mend together, leaving suppleness
Bear them up with your smooth and soothing hands,
As the earth bears up the deepest of wells,
Hurt and wear and damage shall run through your fingers,
Leaving relief and resolve and peace floating about them.
Glorious
Brighid, woman of the sídhe
The barest glimpse of your beauty haunts the poet
Stirs fire into their blood, overflows their mouths with song
But now it will silence a riot of suffering, in both body and mind
The discord of pain will be brought to fit as rocks in a cairn,
Solid joy, rest, and gratitude that will last summers upon winters upon summers
again.
If
you accept this, let give you a roof in the rain, a line out of the turbulent
river’s current, a hearth to warm you, let it be a wave to drown your enemies.
If
you do not accept it, let it melt and only its beauty remain, as the pink and
gold of the dawn does into day.
Note: First posted on Tumblr.
Image: "Mother's Love" by Sandy Kumar on Unsplash.
