“Sister Brigit” by Peter Harris

This heartbreaking and beautiful poem features a nun named Brigit, and a man, the narrator, who apparently performed a ritual of purification and healing together (amongst others). This is not the Goddess Brigit, or the Saint Brigit, but a Brigit who lives in human form among us today and is, like us, wounded and alive. Blessings on Sister Brigit, and on Peter Harris, who wrote this naked, caring poem.

reprinted from Rhino Magazine.

“Sister Brigit” by Peter Harris One night in Ireland during that weeklong death and resurrection retreat has left its tattoo on me, for it happened when I was hurt by love, sick with grief, crazy enough to spend a week preparing to die, and inventing a new life. It was the night I rubbed the naked back of an Irish nun, her skin more a bone bag – all but dead, as she told me, all her life, until the day she could bear it no more and confessed her secret to her mother superior. There, in the pitch-dark common room, just hours before we were to die, having shed everything sheddable, chastened, naked, gathered to say goodbye to our bodies, she’d sat down next to me, both of us shadows, Eros, the faintest of our familiar gods. She rubbed my back also, as she had the backs of countless dying patients in the pauper hospital. Later that night, after an hour of incessant bellows-like deep breathing that would end in our verisimilar deaths, at a point near oxygen whiteout when the dungeon bars have popped loose and the forgotten inmates are staggering out into the blinding sun, at that point, not long before the blasting, goatskinned music would stop suddenly, catapulting us into otherness, more strange, more real and more familiar than any dream, just as the curve of the pre-death crescendo steepened, Sister Brigit rose up – the rest of us, cataleptic, dirigible, about to graduate – rose up to finish off her earthly business, pushed her guide, a heavy man, and then another man, twice her size, she, who was not a hundred pounds, shoved them across the room, through the door into the hall, screaming, get off of me, you bastard, never touch me again! She, who’d been violated all through childhood, had risen and thrown her father out of her life, and then laid herself down in triumph and died. The next day in the resurrection, for that one day, beyond the Stations of the Cross, she danced with me, this woman whom the gods had all but abandoned, danced for the first time, and lightly. The smile in her, the one that rises among the oppressed after the tyrant has been lifted bodily, shaken like a stuffed doll and thrown away forever, the smile shown like the upland meadows in the mountains of County Mayo where, after great downpours, transitory lakes, turloughs, suddenly appear, reflecting back the sun that had shouldered night aside the day Brigit was born then smothered for forty years in ash. I still bear on my palm the feel of the skin on her back. It’s tattooed there because the room was so dark, and she was about to live before she died, and I was no longer sick with myself and, thus, ready to live or die. I say I bear the tattoo of her skin on my palm. Lean close to me so that she might touch your cheek with this palm.

Home - Magazine - buy Rhino - readings & workshops - about Rhino - contact us http://www.rhinopoetry.org/pages/sisterbrigit.html Image of Pilgrims at Lough Derg by Fred Hoare. A Splash of Colour.