Winnowing Fan

"Fionn stood all night, his eyes open
For well-armed demons, for fire, music and death"

Midwinter Prayer, Eilean Ni Chuilleanain

A big bellied moon shone in a cloudless midnight blue sky over the neighborhood. My cloudy eyes gave it an iris until I blinked it away. The trees stood black bare mast limbs or piney sails against the bluer black of the sky. The houses all stood black, too, except for glints of moonlight off a pane or lamp sconce, ships on a still turn of tide. Sleepless, I wandered the house.The brightness of the moon startled me at first. It made it seem like something was going on outside, something silent, hot-white and wet. The street had a sheen like water. The leaves still spread over a few lawns, glowed in the light. The half dead November grass shimmered like ice.I have run down this dark water street in childhood nightmares, probably much like the one that awoke one of the boys awhile ago. He is settled, lapsed into a lasting sleep.

At first, I lay awake in bed for awhile, eyes shut but ears pricking. Minutes ticked by until an hour and more had gone. Then I began the watch.

I walk narrow hallways of thoughts - arguments, anger, frustration, the toll. I walk the cold floorboards of worry for my children - their swollen eyes and hearts.A book, to take my thoughts away, but I inevitably choose one that will only focus them.

"The exile is a wise man with a star and stable
He is an unpeopled poet staring at a broken wall"


Irish Women's Poetry contains two references by two different poets to the same proposed labor of Odysseus, the one raised at the end of the Odyssey - carry your oar inland. A man of the sea in a land without one.I read about martyrs, heroes and fools and the women that weep them, and the women who weep for their own desire to be them.

My heart pounds. Who will voyage the ten years of return if they are taken away? And my father, and his father . . . We all have traveled our way on such alert and wakeful nights. The sad warriors of our own green island in cold moonlight, it will take some woman to sing us our courage and voyages. Courage is a faulty term for the sleeplessness. We are not heroes. We do not ply the sea in search of terror and heartbreak. We stand awake, ready for it to come. We pray the heroism of peace

"I want to lie awake at night
Listening to cream crawling to the top of the jug
And the water lying softly in the cistern"

Swineherd, Eilean Ni Chuilleanain