Eireann's Lovers

Ireland Sings To Her Emigrants:

I am lovesick.
My fields are empty with sorrow
and my wealth dissipates with depression.
No laughing children fill my woods.
They are all gone out into the world.

But I am a woman in love!
And her lovers have turned away.
Return from the far off lands
to me, your ain true love.

Hag no more, I am young,
my breasts as firm as mountain hills
my valley as wet as the Boyne
my hair is soft and long and sweet
and my lips are red with lust.

I am a woman crying out to be loved:
Love me! Love me! Oh love me!
It is the hooded owl's night-call,
refusing to be ignored in the dark.

Come back to your childhood home
where we played outside time or care.
I was a bird and you my song,
laughter raised to the seven heavens.

Re-enter my pleasant lands:
they are fragrant with meadowsweet and gorse,
elderflower, hawthorn and wild rose.

I have prepared a bed for our lovemaking.
It is strewn with petals and grasses and silk,
out on the hills amidst the heather.

There I will reveal to you the secrets of power
best learned from a woman's hot thighs.

Forget the old stories and traditions!
They are not who I am today.
You were in love with a different woman.

Lie with me instead,
my soul spread naked before you.
In that embrace, we will make a new mythology of love.

Kiss me hard on the mouth,
and from our pillow I will whisper a new tradition for life.

Dwell with me
See me as I am

not your mother or grandmother
not Maeve or Grainne or Deirdre,
although I have been all of those and more

but see me without projection:
a small fair woman,
island unto herself
but sister to the world,
fierce and independent
yet vulnerable, lovelorn, battle-weary.

I have claimed my power anew,
sexuality, sovereignty, my soul,
seeking out new priests for the religion of love
and new politicians for the freedom of life.

Now penetrate my depths!
Let us make sighs of fulfillment together,
let everything burn away in passion's fire,
let nothing remain but you and I
and the love between a land and her people.

  

  

Magicicada tredecim

In the thirteenth year they came,

fat caramel bodies tymbolling at noon, 

one month to molt, mate, birth and die.

Summer arrives from under ground.

This brood of lovers

like lightning discharged through a storm of sound.
  

Vibrant cicada hum, lust without shame:
so too my heart hums, a low throaty tune,
and feels the sky's reverberant reply.

Midsummer Hunt

Humid air comes rolling in,
hair-curling moisture,
fine dew upon my face,
                 inhaling the scents of
another world
    a summer world
a world heavily pregnant
amidst dark forest floors.

I have walked this Way
      every year
hunting for the hooded one
                   the hidden one
his name unnamable
save by midsummer trees.

Humidity makes me drowsy,
mind on the ground
under a stupor of heat
panting, licking cracked lips,
even the Shade is heavy–

    

then a voice on the wind! 

     his his his ... the hunted one now hunting

   hunting hard for blood and bone

  hunter down upon me
 my skin to buckskin,

hand in hand, hoof in hoof,
                     penetrating from his darkness,
all knife stare and death kiss.

Humidity swelling,
I can hardly breathe
hardly move
for the weight of him
the weight of air
weight of the world

holding me here,
heaving doe
in mud and rotten leaves,

pressing down until
    clouds burst forth with rain

all that weight
      falling
                  piercing
                                 plummeting
to the earth,
sky       rent       apart,
by lightning’s blind arrow,

hearts heave, earth growls,

wind blows back the dark endless hood
and I am his

 heart his harvest,

 soul his own. 

  

 

Todd Triad

Copyright Jack Brauer, Mountain Photography

"Todd" --  24th January 2010

It’s enough,
his laughing eyes to melt with mine
as he walks past me uninhibited.
“See me,” his sleek perfection demands.

It’s enough,
to be a woman alone with him,
in a wild, long-forgotten place
of all things, to find him waiting.

It’s enough,
his face a full moon of recognition
and my mind unsettled by his desire.
“You’re mine,” his smiling fangs declare.

More than enough,
his bold attempts at wooing, enough
to make me fall in love forever,
my soul caught naked by a fox.

  

"Kitsune Todd" -- 26th January 2010

He was going about fox business
when I met him again.

The trees were thick and he wore that
hunter’s grin on long black lips.

And when I asked him of the day,
he said,
“Kiss me quick.”

My heart ached like fangs sunk deep–
stealing the wind, a desert in drought.

I placed my lips to his cold wet nose
as he breathed in my vital breath.

No sound but the fire burning within,
now igniting in me as we breathed as one.

Heart sat stuck, stuck in my throat,
choking on care, desire, and whim.

He ate my heart with that fatal kiss,
devoured it bloodied red and raw.

My heart burned up in the belly of a fox,
I did not know love could empty the self.

The universe seeps in this hole for a heart,
pulse-pulse-pulsing with the beat of stars.

Note: ”kitsune” is the Japanese word for a fox, but in Eastern culture, the fox is so much more than “just” a fox. They are shapeshifters who, like many other cultures’ Otherworld inhabitants, fall in love with humans, mete out justice, trick the greedy and foolish, etc. The fox who has kept appearing to me in my border dreams is very much a kind of Otherworld fox … and his name “Todd” is linked to my animus. This poem comes from an actual dream-body experience.

 "Love is a Hungry Fox" -- 27th January 2010

Last night, a dove cried on my window.
She wept for her lover in the fox’s belly,
her mourning woke me to moonless night.

“Little one,” I whispered across the sill,
“Come in and rest your tears somewhere safe.”

But she would not come near.
“You’re the wife of the fox who ate my man,
and your love is hot in him. If you feel sorrow,
then so will he, the one who ate your heart.”

Then I wept for her and for myself.
I shook with tears for all the loves
stolen and maimed in the world.

My Todd came home at first light,
his eyes a trickster laugh.

I wore my anger like a coat,
my hair a flaming red.

But he laughed at me and kissed my hands.
“Don’t be angry with me who holds your heart,”
he said with a toothy smile.

“I exist to make the little birds faster and the
sleek hares nimbler,
without me
they’d grow lazy and die, and where would be
the food in that?”

“I exist to make you, you, and
without me, you’d never learn
to be more than who you are now.
I am your longing and I will devour
until there is nothing left but an empty cup
filling up with the tears of the world.”

   

   

  

Sliabh na mBan

“Climb with me to the top”,
picking berries in autumnal sun,
warm and sticky, hot breathed wind
carries her promise of love.

We wend our way in curves,
dizzy with lust, that untamed bird,
leading us up the hill of pleasure,
shy but laughing, intending more.

I chase you, feet wild in pursuit,
rampant in my longing like
Grainne demanding of Diarmuid
unbreakable vows  … or else.

Tumbling, you fall, into the bosom
of the earth, a heather bed made
ready for two eager-mouthed youths,
our legs already a lover’s knot.

Not even the gods of this place,
could come between our bond,
as I share with you my fruit,
a marriage feast for two hearts.

Juice explodes in our mouths,
sweet hunger for more and more,
dripping with red-lipped desire
and stained by a heavy harvest.

We are two wild things, two
blackbirds starved to madness,
two waves rolling into the other,
as we heave our delight to heaven.

“Climb with me to the top”,
to the height of heady dreams,
where even Sliabh na mBan
becomes inflamed with our love.

Note: Sliabh na mBan is a place in Co. Tipperary, Ireland, where Grainne (one of the most beautiful women in Irish myth) fell in love with Diarmuid instead of her older and rather elderly betrothed Fionn (a bit like Trystan and Isyllt). It was traditional in both Ireland and Wales for young couples to go ‘berry picking’ in late summer, early autumn on the hillsides, but of course, it was also a euphemism for so much more! I know in Welsh, there is a close tie between the words for ’sex’ and for ‘hill’ (they are almost identical) showing how ancient the practice of lovemaking on hillsides was. It's still done too. :)