An Irish Blessing on Valentine’s Day
May you know love
spark and flair of youth’s longing
May you know love
steady flame of the hearth
May you know love
glowing embers of age
May you know love
ever changing constant
May you know love
Happy Valentine’s Day. I’ve written this special blessing for Valentine’s Day. Whether you have a partner or are single this blessing applies to us all regardless of relationship status.
My partner, Tony Cuckson, and I have been interviewed by Cavan Community radio as part of a celebration of love during Valentine’s week. We have had the privilege to explore this subject for nearly three decades. We met at a Poetry Circle so we included many of our favourites as readings during the broadcast.
The second half of the programme includes Tony, who hails from Armagh, singing one of my favourites “My Lagan Love” as well as our own musings on how relationships go through cycles and experience rebirth. If you are a lover of Irish traditional songs be sure to listen to his rendition. I know I may be partial, but sometimes it just makes me shiver to hear him sing it.
It truly is a blessing to have been able to and to continue to journey on the greatest learning curve in life. Love also introduced me to Ireland and quite independently of any love for a man I also fell in love with this land, each contour, nook, cranny and cove of it.
An Irish Blessing for St. Brigit’s Feast Day
Brigit’s Mantle
Lay me down upon your cloak -
Swaddle me. Sing to me
your secrets of always enough.
Lay me down upon your cloak -
Wrap me snug. Tell me a story.
The miracle of always enough
Lay me down upon your cloak-
Rock me. Gently now lay me
down in the source of always enough
© Bee Smith, 2009. All rights reserved.
On this feast day of St. Brigit I offer this prayer poem in celebration of her most amazing spirit.
The prayer poem is based on the tale that St. Brigit asked a noble of Leinster for land to build her abbey. He laughed because it was very good land and he would be foolish to give it away. She then said, “Sir, if you would promise to give me only the land that my cloak will cover I would be satisfied.” He assented. Four of her nuns each took one corner of her cloak and walked east, south, west and north. Her cloak expanded and expanded and expanded as acre upon acre was covered with her cloak. In abject terror the lord ordered them to stop. They did. But the land that was covered by Brigit’s Mantle was deeded to her as the lord was a man of his word. And it was enough for her to establish her abbey Cill Dara (Cell of Oak) in what is modern day Kildare.
May you always know the source of always enough.
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