One Poem by Robert (Roibeard) Shanahan

 

BRIGID


The traveling whistle blowing entrancement
Poetised laments
Keening is witnesssed is born
Picked rushes spokes for pagan sun wheels
Bend to imbolc purification frenzy kept to silence
Pledging foreheads envision Brigid

Umbrae forments the Brideog straw cross
Tattooed on a pregnant ewe
Sentience rotary in sunbeams our green mantles
Rising from her roots
Leaving Bres behind underground ~otherworld
Brigid

The Dagda harps thaumaturgical all darkness his strings
The plucking the calling in of justness

From birch and willow limb white wands of prophecy
Hangs a quiver of fiery arrows
Lit from the division of embers the very centre
Smelter from the forged sacrosanct crucible of Brigid
Clangour glangour clang metal mountainous Goibniu hammers
Rat a tat a tat rat a tat a
Petrified treelike hospitality anvil

Arrows fiery in their pouch fly now in the augury of Brigid
Arcing arrows nineteen purity numeral
Ingress Brigid's mouth
Hover through paradisiacal space
Pulsating nurturing passings past Bebhion uterus
In her inner sides charms painted rebirth unveiled
Protective symbols of compassion
Arrows fly around inside our most high
Strike the amniotic sac sown from grief
Her lost son
Ruadon
Past her heart
Two interlocked swans
Caer and Aengus

Goddess sighs
Resplendent color spectrums fall on the shafts of the arrows
Cailleach's ripped black veil ragging
Fletchings sailing behind the arrowhead
Inside her arrows flying in her legs
Cockerels soar as ravens inside her ankles
Arrows magick led to her ribs
Eighteen arrows stay as healing snakes interlocking

Bres his ignoble head breaks the ground
A furtive entry a Fomorian sniffle

Goddess's set upon brother ....Ogma
Throws firewood in retribution pelting his noggin
Creaking wooden oxen meander around him
One tattooed Fe the other Men
Snorting they stand on each vitiated side of Bres
Lift their snouts high in Glaistig's way
The air is flowered is pretty stones is shell is Bres
Transfigured in Brigid

Bres blows her own destined wind through her celestial body
Air that once bought life to a stillborn
Raises the last arrow high in mind
Then a voice

Brigid Brigid Brigid "Grand Facilitator of Poetic Inspiration "

I Cairbe Poet of Tuatha de Danann
Address you fired my satire to ashe

Brigid you are bathing in light rays of your own light
Top tree lying your arms branched
Goddess bestowed by her own creation
The inner of the outer in the inner world
The softness of our falling through the cosmos as we slumber Brigid
The forges sun started fire catches
Beating beat beat beating a bronze mirror reflecting the world Brigid

excuse me Cairbe
my only chance

brigid brigid Brigid ''Muire Na Gael'

If thou I can amuse i be nine years old eight years 364 days
In Marian devotion
Sisters of Charity bestowed my name
brigid on the first realizations I knew

I soon was shaken
My hands sewn straight
The way of repetitive prayer
Repetitive prayers in walls of stone
Entranced in the crosses shadow changing
The shadowed slow walk in incensed fumes
Of the shadow of the shadows moving
Moving closer

A grasping hand under my pleated skirt
Stiff shuffling leg held straight skirt statues
A fear of losing your light repulsing our light
I held in my tunics pocket
Under my arm now when my tunic was torn
Light is my only view of you

Again the cruel prod
My head faced down
Contact
The fear of needing contact
With you Brigid

Aloneness am I all that was created Is that the burden
The priests and his coterie will fall
The stained stoned walls stained by children's hands trying to flee
The stone walls will to the air crack
Stolen candles will flicker those that existed before

Morning stained glass tips of the crown of thorns
Spluttering candles Illuminating the freezing halls
A attempted silence torrent of footsteps
One off the beat
Our one ecstasies of nature thought

Sent to their workings alone
brigid alone with countless spirits who sit alone
Touch little touch no touch
Repetitive touch are whacks imprinting the back of her neck
Innocent
Oncoming heavy trudged steps
Stopping steps at each cubicle
Slyly enters one
Swings of his cross
Scrapes brigid's head
Blood drips
She arises assailed
Scrapers to the stairs

"Go up you temptress closer to our god
The priest croaks he spits

brigid to the pinnacle of the church
Impales her self on the steeple
Goddess blood
Brigid rebirths on the gargoyle

Excuse me little sacred one

Brigid Brigid Brigid
"Grand Firer of Inspiration and Poetry

Though the battle with Cailleach
Is in the force of changing seasons
We are holding praise

I Cottier
Destined in a maelstrom of dust and hawthorn flowers

My wife holds me up
Beneath my son holds her
Lower my daughter grips him
And further down my sister upraises her
Her daughter uplifts her
Under her brother bears her
Further to the ground below
Pagan hefting Pagan
All the clan holds each other up
A human ladder to blessed tree top

A chain human each Pagan soul linked
Nexus devotion to the Goddess provider
As our human tree chances in wind
Our touch to tree to you divine

From those who live with soil
Soil is the covering of our final falls
Worshippers of sprouting food from soil
The cracking of the earth for the table
The long darkness shuddering the clan
Hold to the swaying my people
Brigid if I stutter if I seem to fall
The movement of the clan tired hold

I know tied by passed down hair
From a soul who never wakes
Dreaming only with you Brigid
I in safety take from my bag a comb
And tease the hair to breaking
It breaks I fall
Past the faces of everyone I know
Sailing in the Goddess air
Through the roof of the round house
Draped on the inner post rings I am
Brigid my injured form
Blood drips down the pole
Forms a sacred word
BRIGID

Erin's spell manifests as Gods and Goddess charms
Celtic spell coalesced with all breasts
The very soil flows into Pagan chambers
Deep within all mortal life
Pagans spin on their heads
Desires of bring her back to the Pagan flame
Back from the chains of christianity
High king and falsity
Brigid transcends time and space
Like the rock of Inishtrahll Isle

Erin's thought sits gravid on a colossus Celtic wheel
Rotating to the Midwife point of the round house the earth
Birthing herself this time fiery
BRIGID

ROBERT (ROIBEARD) SHANAHAN

 

I am a poet playwright and a painter

A storyteller

For me all there really is

Is Compassion and Expression

I described myself once as a...

‘Grand Lector of Apocalyptic Utterances’

 

I live in Tasmania

I am from the Irish diaspora

My family from Cork

I have had my prose published in Australia

Ireland in ‘Outburst’ magazine

Numerous times in ‘Life Encounters’

India in ‘Setu’ poetry magazine

One of my proses was awarded high commendation

In the W. B. Yeats poetry prize

‘Violence at the Egg’

Was read out in the National Parliament of Australia