Saint Brigid’s Day

Stock Photo: A Snow Squall

This winter has been frigid. We’ve seen several polar vortices and snow squalls with icy winds that sweep the snow as it falls upward in all sorts of phantasmagoric patterns. It also happens that we’re approaching Saint Brigid’s Day, the traditional start of mid-winter on February 1st, when we’re told ewe’s milk comes in to coincide with when the lambs are born. In keeping with the unruly weather and the lore around Saint Brigid’s Day, I wrote this poem. The poem is a sort of a dance between a man and a woman, which unfolds in a tripartite pattern. It’s meant like a scherzo to be fast and playful. Hopefully, I was able to convey this in the poem. I imagine it as the third movement in the symphonic poem I started with Cast Like Ashes and The Land, The Sea, And the Sky. I anticipate finishing it up with a long fourth movement. As always, I value your close reading, insight and input. I hope you enjoy reading it.

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SAINT BRIGID’S DAY

A mournful howl, snow hangs near vertical 
Blurring the edges of the trees and fence 
Behind the barn, the sunlight fractured by 
Thousands of ice crystals that soften straight 
Lines of the false Euclidean geometry 
We have been taught exists. In the snow squall 
We come to doubt all but the whorl of wind,
The violin of creaking boughs and joists,
The smell of coffee as it percolates 
And warmth from embers filling the house 
With the sweet smell of seasoned apple wood.
The snow is taken up as soon as it
Lands, it is moving through my yard like starlings
In flight, in unison and strange patterns.
Mathematics fails to capture such graceful arcs,
Evoking wondrous skipped rhythms of drum beats 
Around ancestral fires. Take a breath.
Get up and dance like dervishes dance and whorl,
How David danced in an ephod of fine 
Linen before the Ark of the Covenant.


You sing and pirouette while last year’s glee
Still devastates. In my confinement here 
I weep, reflecting on past ecstasies.

I plead come back to me. My time draws near.
What once was sown has not remained asleep,
It germinates within the rising fear 

That I might lose this infant that I wish to keep.
Come back to me, my lover and my friend.
I promise you that we will be waist-deep 

In joyous love, but now I must descend 
Deep down through memories of my well-kept 
Life, and on which it seems now to depend.

Strutting in like a troubadour you swept
Me off my feet, the ease with which we crossed 
The crowded floor, oh how my spry heart leapt!

And when at last we kissed, a holocaust 
Where you and I were slowly burnt on altars 
Of our own making. From there my life, storm-tossed,

Was never as it was before. Your fault 
Or mine it doesn’t matter, my old life gone 
All topsy-turvy from your somersaults 

Your moods as you grew more and more withdrawn 
Until the day that you abandoned me 
The way the lips of lovers part come dawn.

I plead come back, come back and finally 
Embrace the feast of my fecundity.


Mid-winter seedlings lie beneath the snow 
Invisibly preparing for new shoots 
In advance of Spring’s arrival. Fungi work 
In secret decomposing last year’s crushed 
Stubble, providing moistened soil for fields 
Pregnant and poised to germinate in due 
Time, and emerging crown toward the sun 
But now are caught in liminal thin space 
Under the snow, the new green waiting there 
In silence waiting to be born and rise,
To reach upward and change our worlds forever.
Let arctic winds above wreak havoc, ice 
Spiraling upward like starlings in flight
In unison, in strange arcs, wings dip,
Pivot this way and that, and whorl, they whorl!
So yes, I will come back to you to pledge 
Fidelity and love. Together soon 
We’ll dance the lively dance of parenthood 
And I’m prepared, chaotic as it may be 
To embrace the feast of your fecundity.

David Rizzo