Tonight is the eve of St. Brigid’s day, herald of spring
one of four quarter days in our pagan calendar
and I navigate my way through gusting wind to the postbox,
carry the mail up to the house like a prize.

Ice tightens around the country as I peel back the strip
from the envelope as if time had folded back on itself
and laid bare the contours and textures of the land.
I pull out the map of Kildare to survey its ordinance.

The sky remains resolutely grey as I view bogs, dykes,
streams and mudflats that are wrinkled as if scattered
and jumbled like piled-up jigsaw puzzle pieces that cannot hold
their rightful place and are now purling past our home address

as if rising with Brigid in the flatlands of Kildare, her voluminous
cloak shifting and stretching under her hand. She built
her church there from the King’s forfeit, with the warp and weft
of the green rushes of her cross marking the trig point of her promise

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