Today's poem is by Jill McCabe Johnson

Gaslight
       

                            We all know the silencing of women.
                Like Brigid, the goddess the poets adored.

        She invented keening for her son who died
            on the battlefield. In honor of the healer and smith,

                women tended a perpetual flame that cut through
            darkness like a relay of whistles in the night.

        Her oxen, Fe and Men, worked the fields in service
          to her feminine powers. But medieval ministers

        demoted Brigid from goddess to saint, stole
    the fire of Imbolc when villagers lit winter wicks,

and renamed the festival Candlemass, a celebration
            of Christian patriarchy and the false belief
                        in virginity as proof of purity.

                                Every woman whose original ideas
                                        have been appropriated by men
                                    and has been told it was a man's design

                in the first place, carries the brilliance of Brigid
            and the burden of the earliest man who refused
        to shoulder responsibility for his own weakness.

The festival of Proserpine, the Eleusinian mysteries
        of Demeter and Persephone, the goddess Februa—
            each event venerated the dawn of ovulation
                following the passage of menses.

                It's no wonder patriarchy rewrote
            women's cycles into shame,
        silencing even our deepest
                tides of feminine might.

Copyright © 2024 Jill McCabe Johnson All rights reserved
from Tangled in Vow & Beseech
MoonPath Press
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission