I Carry Your Name into Daylight

Brigid Elizabeth,
young mother of my mother,
I see you holding her close.
I call you by the name you cast away
when being a brigid meant
to be subservient.

Brigid Elizabeth
your husband gone to war,
I see you standing erect
soldiering on in his absence.
You promise everything to the babe,
pledging to produce no other.

Grandmother Brigid,
I add your name to my own.
and call upon your Irish fortitude and iron will.
In a world where women around the world are still
invisible appendages,
I carry forth your sovereignty.

Grandmother Brigid,
all along the length of your life,
you defied what others expected.
Your self-reliance and self-possession
cast a coolness that hid your warmth.
Unnatural they called it, in a woman.

Ancestor Brigid Elizabeth,
beneath your stance in the man’s world,
it’s your tender ardor I now call forth,
the burning ember of your namesake,
Goddess of the emerald isle.
I invoke the flame of Brigid you carried like a secret.

Brigid Goddess of Poetry and Healing.
Was it She who empowered you to forge,
from metals of circumstance so harsh,
a life of literature and beauty?
I think that though you hid your name,
She sheltered you as her own.

Grandmother Brigid you
were the one who sat on a bench
prim and proud and wearing gloves
amidst the barefoot hippies,
at my wedding to a priest in the park.
You knew how it was to disavow the pattern.

Grandmother Brigid
Your daughter was the poem
you wrote and tended and molded,
and she in turn bequeathed to me
the hidden flame now burst to burning.
I carry your name into daylight.

©Susa Brigid Silvermarie 2024