Best Wishes for Another New Year

from the Hag of Beara and Anam Cara


An Cailleach Bhearra
(The Hag of Beara)

An Cailleach Bhearra (The Hag of  Beara) is a Beara antiquity who, from pre-Christian times, has been seen as a wise woman of influence in western Ireland...particularly in the Beara Peninsula  in West Cork. Havine greeted eons of New Years, this iconic woman's stories of her relationship with and influence on Beara's creative culture and hauntingly beautiful landscape are timeless.

 
Photograph by John Eagle

Leanne O'Sullivan grew up and matured as a poet looking directly across Coulagh Bay to the Hag. In her third book of poetry, Cailleach, The Hag of Beara, Leanne brings the Hag and her stories into modern view; in the poem Autumn, she offers insights into the relationship this wise woman has and will always have with the land on which she stands.

Autumn

          The stars vanished during the night, in the stillness,
          and the sun lifted like a pale hand over the hush.
          Afterwards, I lay beneath a blanket my mother wove.
          My arms felt her mouth sigh, and I breathed in the earth,
          feeling my way along the paths and hatching light.

          This morning the pine trees sap the damp air,
          sunshine and moonshine are misted together
          with closeness, shivering a musk of dew from the grasses.

          Gold morning, and the ocean rises over the rocks.
          I learn to count in suns, to hear the morning
          as if I were pressing my ear to its moist pulse.
          I learn to smell the hoops of bramble berry in the dark.

              
  May your New Year be filled with timeless peace as you pursue your own relationship with your world.

Sue Booth-Forbes
Anam Cara Writer's and Artist's Retreat
Eyeries, Beara, Co. Cork, Ireland
  
  

  

  
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