Who is popular today?

To celebrate St Brigid’s Day, the Department of Foreign Affairs and Museum of Literature Ireland have collaborated on Three Poems for Brigid, a series of three short online films. Each showcases a poet and a spoken-word performer, and is based around one of the three aspects of Brigid as the triple goddess of poetry, healing and craftwork.
The poems were commissioned from three of Ireland’s finest women poets, spanning the creative generations: Doireann Ní Ghríofa, Paula Meehan and Nidhi Zak/Aria Eipe. Artists performing the works include Osaro Azams, Ruth McCabe and Caitríona Ennis, with music by Syn, Dowry and Dreamcycles.
Through the poem and accompanying imagery, each film explores the theme as it relates to Irish women from past to present. The films aim to reach the widest audience possible, both local and international, and to engage Irish people around the world with living female Irish writers, performers and the feminine continuum that stretches through our history, is alive in our society, and is exemplified through both the pagan and Christian symbolism of Brigid.
The short films are available to view on the Department of Foreign Affairs YouTube channel.
Old Biddy Talk By Paula Meehan Have you no home to go to… The young mostly on one another’s screens – but these two rapt in each other at the boundary wall: that genetic imperative, the force that through the pandemic drives their flowering, is my spring rain, is my restorer from the deep delved wells, hauled to the healing light of this world pure water tasting of gemstone & iron, quartzite & gold: starlight & planets, the sun & the comets, the moon herself, she sacred to Brigit, mirrored in my bucket. My own breath, old spirit, stirring in the cowled reflection of the earth geologic, old seas, old forests wherein once we swung from tree to waterlogged tree become shale, become coal, underground tributaries to rivers of oil - breath lit fuel in their veins. They are fire – vestal and flame. They are immortal.
At Bridget’s Well By Doireann Ní Ghríofa When rain fell on a path of stone, one by one, we appeared alone. Each of us wore a different face, but we were all the same – drawn by ache to lift green latches, drawn by want to walk the dark passage. Past paper stares, we knelt and wept, we who fed the well in rivulets, whose plunged wrists trembled with vessels of blue violets. We each spoke a spell of stone and in her gloom heard prayers turn poems. Ask her, Bríd, what will be come of us? Listen. Liquid, the syllables; the echo, luminous.
i mbolc an invocation By Nidhi Zak/Aria Eipe guardian of the fawn brightest of the flame awaken us at dawn o exalted! hear your name come glinting in the hearth kohl lashes lined with soot steel flint omega arches fleet mare so light of foot milk flecked o’er the mouth skin tight sweet lipped foam suckled at the reddening ears, corners of your cloak glistening by a winch above the veiled amnion of well hold us, head neath water, that we might breathe again stay winter: light the torch in dark where life is forged in the belly; draw breath — draw rein