“Brighid of Keening” by Jenne Micale

 

Brighid of Keening

 

You didn’t blame Ruadhan as you bowed your head
low, the willow branches of your hair swinging,
rocking with the gale of your sobs, every
flower dropping its bloom, every egg webbed with cracks
for the ending of what should have spun forward
into time and light

 

Sometimes sons are swept up in waves of words
and choose the wrong side, enraptured by spears,
the graceful pass of a blade, that wonderment
when a star winks out. Every child has this
rage hatching in their core. We raise it up
into time and light

 

or train it like a vine to more useful ends.
The knowledge of this racks you too, how you,
the poetess, spoke the truth to him clearly
and still he laughed and picked up the spear. Even
the smith could see through the ruse as he threw it
into time and light

 

and how that chosen victim wouldn’t consent
and instead plucked a barbed insult from the air
and flung it back. You howl, your white neck showing,
as you replay the act: a brother slaying
a son, a salt well pulling tears from the deep
into time and light

 

because in the end, there are no sides but this:
We who are bound by time and those beyond
it, we who yet walk in day and those who dip
over the rim and out of sight. Those we can reach
and those beyond the touch of even tears
into time and light

 

 

 

 Image: "The Lamentation, the central panel from a large altarpiece from the Benedictine monastery at Sopetrán, northeast of Madrid, Spanish, Castile-La Mancha, ca. 1480 CE, walnut with gilding.” Circa 1480 CE. Photo by Mary Harrsch on Wikimedia. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.