Aimsir: A Seasonal Journal (Imbolc 2023)

‘From grey of dusk, the veils unfold

To pearl and amethyst and gold –Thus is the new Day woven and spun.’

- Fiona MacLeod,

and Night’, The Evergreen: A Northern Seasonal, Spring 1895

‘Day

Aimsir: A Seasonal Journal Imbolc 2023

Ursula O’Sullivan-Dale and

Aisling Ní Choibheanaigh Nic Eoin

Aimsir Acknowledgements

This issue would never have been possible without the guidance and love of our friends and families.

To all our friends who contributed writing, photography or artwork, thank you.

To our families, who always encouraged us to be creative, and supported us throughout this process, thank you.

We would also like to thank Seán Hewitt, who took the time to write an afterword for us. This thoughtful piece aligns perfectly with the themes of this edition and how we hope to encourage readers to observe, and engage with, the natural world through the lens of seasonality. We are very grateful to include it among these pages.

Go raibh maith agaibh as bhur dtacaíocht!

- Ursula and Aisling

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Note from the editors.

We welcome readers to the first edition of Aimsir.

To begin, we would like to introduce the journal, and the ideas that have helped to shape it. The publishing schedule of Aimsir is inspired by that of The Evergreen: A Northern Seasonal, an interdisciplinary magazine that was first published in 1895, in four issues, edited by Patrick Geddes and William Sharp. Despite its brief life, ceasing publication after less than two years, The Evergreen had an immense cultural impact. Aimsir seeks to revive and to rework this format, and has its origins in wanting to encourage readers to stop and more closely consider the natural world, particularly through the lens of seasonality. The selected pieces of poetry, prose, photography and artwork in these pages are intended to kindle an appreciation of human connections with nature, of its beauty, and of its changeability.

As Seán Hewitt observes in his afterword for our Imbolc edition, humans are ‘instinctive, feeling animals’, whose internal landscapes are shaped by the weather, in precisely the same way that environmental landscapes are. However, many of us are drifting towards aseasonal lives, largely due to our lack of direct contact with the natural world, and what we perceive as our lack of reliance on it. Given this move away from seasonal living, we wanted to use this project as an opportunity to reconsider inherited understandings of Celtic traditions and their relationships with the natural world. Each of the festivals we have chosen to structure this journal brings with it a different way of relating to its signalling season. Modelled on the Irish division of the year, which takes its inspiration from older Celtic calendars, Aimsir’s work and publication will respond to a number of key marking festivals.

The first of the year is Imbolc, the marker of spring, which occurs on the first day of February and is closely associated with Brigid of Ireland. It is traditionally celebrated with the weaving of Brigid’s crosses from rushes, which are then hung above the doors of houses to bring protection to those inside. Another associated custom is to hang strips of clothing outside on the last night of January, with the belief that Brigid will bless them as she passes the house, and that they too will bestow protection on the owner for the year ahead.

Imbolc marks the beginnings of growth and birth in the year, and many passages in the ninth-century work Bethu Brigte outlines how Brigid’s spiritual power often manifests itself through forms of feeding. From feeding herself on the milk of a white, red-eared cow in order to heal her spiritual self, to transforming a

cup of water into milk in order to cure another, her association with dairy is particularly indicative of the healing and protective associations that surround her. This idea of creation from natural substances and objects is beautifully depicted by Maeve Breathnach’s front-cover illustration, in which a Brídeóg is surrounded by a number of botanical subjects, underlining the fact that it is a figure made from plants. A thing that has been given life from natural materials.

In the editions to follow, we will next consider Bealtaine, meaning May in Irish and signalling the beginning of summer. Traditional celebrations of this festival often involve lighting bonfires and visiting holy wells. The following edition will be Lúnasa, which translates to August in Irish. It indicates the beginning of the harvest season, and has traditionally been honoured by feasting, the visitation of holy wells and hilltop festivities. Lastly will be Samhain, another festival named after its corresponding month, and occuring on the first of November. It marks the beginning of winter, and is believed to be the time when the veil between the material world and the Otherworld is thinner, allowing spirits to pass between both as they please.

Each of these festivals have been observed across Ireland, and in different regional forms throughout the Atlantic archipelago, since pre-Christian times. They have shaped the years of countless generations, who read the signals from the weather, the plants, and the animals that surrounded them. Recognising the way in which people often turn to the natural world and its imagery during times of emotional difficulty—as was clearly evidenced by a communal re-engagement with nature during and after the coronavirus pandemic—we hope to develop a space for people to explore their relationship with the environment, and the natural spaces of the world, freely. To allow themselves to be shaped, once again, by the changing of the seasons, which has inspired such celebrations, stretching back into the earliest memories of the Celtic cultural imagination. We hope that this journal might open a dialogue between different communities on these islands, allowing for a variety of linguistic and cultural expressions of seasonality to interact with, and inform, one another.

In the same way that The Evergreen oversaw an assembly of voices looking to celebrate contemporary Celtic literature, art and culture, we hope Aimsir can offer a forum for voices with an interest in re-imagining or re-connecting with these traditions. Like Geddes and Sharp, we hope to encourage people towards the beauty of the earth, and highlight the importance of its protection and preservation. More than just a distant, indeterminate source of inspiration, we want to incite readers and contributors to immerse themselves in nature, with the seasons as an anchor for these new discussions, both aesthetically and thematically.

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These pages are intended to stimulate discussions on how contemporary culture in these islands is informed by the hauntings of older traditions, and to help us to develop, as Hewitt advocates, the gift of feeling again. With Imbolc, just as the symbolic emergence of new life from milk through Brigid’s intervention is detailed in Bethu Brigte, we hope this edition might contribute to the rebirth that we see beginning to occur in these islands. A return to those ideas rooted within The Evergreen, a return to older traditions, and a return to an embodied way of living with seasonality and the natural world, marked by the notable introduction of a public holiday in Ireland for Imbolc this year. Importantly, this rebirth might allow us to move away from the romanticised representations of a ‘Celtic’ identity perpetuated by late nineteenth- and twentieth-century revival movements, and towards an inclusive way of interacting with tradition, one that is strengthened by the diversity of these islands. One that recognises the beauty of inter-community enmeshment, of joined celebration, and of creating a new identity which does not privilege the experiences of one group over the other.

Publishing works in Irish and English, both together and apart, is a crucial element of Aimsir’s objective. Soon, these works will hopefully be joined by other voices, in languages from across the islands, such as Gàidhlig, Scots, Welsh and Manx. We hope, in our own way, within these pages, to let all the various identities of the archipelago take a new shape, one which is founded on real and embodied connection with the natural world, with seasonality, and with community.

Aim-sir: [noun, fem]

weather, season, world, time, tense

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Ceangail Gharbha

by Jamie O’Toole

Cold air from the mountain

Cold air from the mountain comes down like a collapsing lung.

by Ursula O’Sullivan-Dale

A curving moan that cools to numbing like the eye’s warmth when it meets that blue-on-blue-on-blue of sky, pleating inwards into roundness, suppleness.

Your turning body is just like ours un-peaked and sinking into earth.

The last of your cold unfurls, and is lost in a spring breeze.

A name-calling, a ritual from the old world. A voice, broken-through

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Birdsong

You are under wings, under wing bones, pulled taut, structured

by Aisling Ní Choibheanaigh Nic Eoin

(response to William M. Roth’s novel Birdsong)

You look up at the brown undersides of feathers, speckled, they keep out the weather, keep that bold mouth of yours dry,

Some strange noise goes through those bones, through your own, like bits of static, caught by one another, pulled and thrown together, static through those wing bones, through the bones of your feet, pressed against the twigs and moss.

It is the sound of your niece singing her birdsong.

See (ii) of Notes for more information on Birdsong.

Lamb from Milk

by Niamh Hughes

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Broken Seasons Still Turn

Ag druidim leis an ngrianstad

by Clare Ní Lanagáin

Something like a frost at last. All up to this point was a mild, elongated, unresolved autumn. Along the road, late sloes persist in the spot of blackthorn, the dusting of light mildew on the purple-black berries looking like frost. The song thrush started up its paired refrains this morning in the sycamore, and there's another one at the end of the line of trees just before the bridge. It glows orange in the sun, oval breast expanding, recklessly spending its precious warming energy on the twinned notes it has no choice but to sing.

An abrupt explosion of hailstones, and the day grows dark as an eclipse. Thunder booms and the almost leafless sycamore trees rattle in the wind. The cat's ears swivel forward and back, following the noise. After a few minutes, the sky becomes livid with diluted sunlight, and the hailstorm is shot through with luminosity.

A cloying warm gale strips across the farmland. The rain has no origin; it explodes out of the air in invasive bursts, like himalayan balsam seeds. A sparrowhawk is hanging above a hedge of whitethorn, held in its fluttering bobbing as much by the wind as its own effort. It yields to another gust, flattening its wingspan against the iardheisceart force and is swept away across a ribbed and silage-smelling field.

The end of a wasted bright day. Nothing but clouds till December. I'm walking into the sunset whispering the old pining songs in order to feel something like a human. A plane's trail slices white and thin and bright across the sky. The tail dissipates into a few white untethered gems while its head rears over the early waxing moon. The starlings are whining the evening in and that whitethorn hedge is secretly full of goldcrests.

Later, an icewhite full moon chills Mars in its heels. Το φεγγάρι και τ'αστέρια. Most stars are muted by the moon's blank gaze. Alderaban is a dull red flicker down to its right and Rigel oscillates from white to mintgreen to silver, hanging above the chapel roof to the east. Valiant Capella is nearly drowned by proximity to the moon, but tiny Elnath at the edge of Taurus is a chilly blue pinpoint, unsparkling. Castor and Pollux are behind the tree to the northeast, visible in glimpses through the branches, a complacently-stacked pair. The moonlight is the frost’s John, making clear the way, calmly rinsing with affectless light the hardy plants that will

survive it, and the tender leaves that will be curled and black by morning.

Yesterday we visited the Blackwater, cois abhainn, across from Templemichael. Redmond Barry's split-trunk tree drooped dark grey against the black woods. It was sunset and the sky over the weir at the river's swerve was citric gold. It reflected pale over water echoing the screeching egrets, gabbling ducks and curlews’ precious bubblings. Rooks began summoning each other for night, sweeping in from all sides and blooming into a clattering cloud around the dark spire of Templemichael Church, heading northwest. Ar bruach na habhann tender plants had been burned by frost, but the grass and dock leaves endured. Mist rolled like steam over the dark mobile water surface, and the robins, finches and wrens didn't rest for a moment, always in motion, searching for survival.

Two fishermen wound in their lines, snags of riverweed rising at intervals from the silvery water as the breath-thin cord pulled in. They packed up their seats, leaving their brazier near the old ferryman's cottage.

An stad agus an casadh

It’s a fine cold bright day. Why do I feel sad and on edge?

On the train up and back both times I had the low sun in my eyes. It’s around the time of St Lucie’s day, the solstice of the metaphysicists. At noon cool butterlight, at afternoon cool orangelight. Πορτοκαλιά. A direct beam to the eye, the sun and I paired, pregnant raindrops of light. Its blue and purple copies, its seacoloured children, are flickering and floating across the sphere of my iris. The sun is moving into Taurus, the broad iced bog is rising up to claim it. Soon the sun will be replaced in the southeast by Sirius, fluttering its own mountain-mauve and electric blue sequence of spheres.

A flash of glamour in the leafless riparian trees: a bullfinch. A rosyfeathered male ag dreapadóireacht up the tree, his voice dropping in quick, short, almost inaudible coos. Under the branches the river trots along. The dippers are whipping back and forth from the north bank to the south, under the bridge’s arches, scoping out the crevice where they will build their nest. The shortest astronomical day has already passed and the solstice is starting its three-day guard, the sun taking three days as a soldier standing to attention before returning to the road.

That rarest of things: a sunlit solstice day. It rises to the southeast, closest to the

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south. A covering of peach cloud is lightly burned away by the first few leakings of orange light. The small forest to the north, on top of the hill, is gradually illuminating and shadowing the branches. A tiny airplane trail high in the eastern sky is lit into a white kinch. The edges of the rooftops are glinting. A small committee of crows start up their voices, while the goldfinches at the nyger seed feeder pay no attention whatsoever.

The walled holy well at Stún Carthaigh nó b’fhéidir Teach Mhic Cárthaigh is flooded; an embarrassment of holy soakage covers the ivy and the brambles and what’s left of the ferns. The sun glints on the water, glamorous rays illuminating the mud on the wellbed. There is an ancient hawthorn tree clinging to the outer wall, part of its trunk embedded in the earth, its weathered, aboveground roots sprawling over the stone, winding and wandering through grooves filled with moss and lichen. The top of the tree leans away from the trunk, the well, the water, its sharp inverted L softened by an agglomeration of dead ivy branches crawling up the side and cloaking the sceach-spined branches. A minute red spiderwebbed mushroom grows in another, much tinier L out of the lower trunk, its cap bronze and wrinkled, its stem smooth and pale ginger-coloured, like a fox cub’s belly. A meantán mór complains thinly from a spiked branch, then switches its position from branch to wall, and its call from squished creak to high-pitched bray.

Northwest of the well the remains of a forgotten bridge run under the road, one half-buried arch out of alignment with the broad line of water draining away from a gap in the stone wall. A tree beside the road is heavy with dried berries and catkins. What tree is this? Must check when the leaves come out. Not so long now, not from today.

Now comes the spring as a day in midwinter

The temperature shot up fifteen degrees, the skies unloaded. All is mild and wet. A tailless wagtail balances on the edge of the pavement, its round bum in a pantomime of bobbing, its phantom limb bouncing over the gutter. After overwhelming downpours, a subtle dusk. The sky is coated with thick navy cloud, except for a modest line in the west. The dark cloud leans heavily on the horizon’s border of clear bright lemon sky.

On Stephen’s day the starlings, speckled breac, gather at a seaside cafe, balancing on the glass fence, tirling and whistling with their greenbluenavyblack feathers lifting, imitating the squeal of the gull surfing the strong southerly wind, whitebright against the blue sky. The wind blows the dog’s shiny ears inside out.

Na crotaigh dheireanacha os comhair an earraigh

A new year’s eve sunset in the gulf-streamed southsouthwest of this island: the sky behind the trees bluegrey except for a blurred pink column, an inverted triangle ending in a bleeding orange half-circle. The light crisps the tops of neighbouring clouds with shavings of flame-pink.

Μεσάνυχτα. A bell rings in the cool mild night. The diffused light of the half-clouded moon reflects sheerly, softly on the estuary. The southern sky is pale, like the western sky at midnight at the summer solstice. The clouds amass in the horizon but the circumpolar zone shows a few stars and asterisms: honey-coloured Capella, Perseus faint behind clouds, copper Mars and Orion hanging in the southeast.

The old bronze bell is rung by the farmer for exactly two minutes. It is deep and long, with only a small ring for a handle. Around the outside it’s decorated with embossed dancing figures and a Celtic knot trail. It was pulled from a shipwreck by another farmer, diving for salvage, well over sixty years ago.

Fireworks go off in neighbouring villages; low blasts and dull flashes of light in the cloudy horizon. The noise wakes a curlew, one of the hundred and fifty breeding pairs left, and it makes a gentle complaint into the night.

On the first night of the new year, like the poet long ago who stayed up all night listening to the now-silenced nightingale, I stand in moonlight and listen to the bubbling of one of na crotaigh dheireanacha. The moon is reflected in a puddle, quivering like it did in that long-dead infant’s eyes. Moonlight glows the edges of the ferns and dead bracken spilling from the wet hedgerows; a livestock animal whuffs and stomps lightly, invisible in the field beyond the roadbank, Sirius sparkling just above it. The whitethorn trees pattern black branches in a network against the sky, while the curlew bubbles and an oystercatcher squips from the estuary.

The clouds are swift and pale. They mute and unmute the full moon as they sweep over it in the soft night wind, pearlescent fluffy grey, refracting a rainbow around the moonglow. The starred sky left behind as the clouds are blown past looks washed and clean.

Tá tú tagtha róluath, ach fós fáilte ó chroí leat, a Imbolc.

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The Ruins

How bright the buildings are, at first sight. Walls turning skyward, splitting from their earthplaces. They are giants, unlearning dirt and singing stone, enfolding themselves in time.

by Ursula O’Sullivan-Dale

Waterways powered this city, once. They opened the gates to oblivion, which had a river passing through it. The water was carrying that fine dust, the atoms of civilisation.

Thirsting for more, the towers found their throats, and tasted the wild air. Dirt was singing again, the sand becoming restless in the writhing glass that glowed with ghosts.

Now look down, where the buried heart browns, to mouths closing with skeleton speech. Repeating only what is spoken— laying words to rest in clay.

This is where a city dies, in the murmuring feathers of nesting birds. With each season passing like a new thought, a dream of some other body.

It hears something, in the blinking dim of eternity. Something that bends spines backwards and returns you to your first home, the one with no walls.

Na Fothraigh

Astriúchán le Aisling Ní Choibheanaigh Nic Eoin

Féach cé chomh geal is atá na foirgnimh, ar an gcéad amharc, Na ballaí casta i dtreo an spéir, ag scaradh ó na háiteanna-domhanda. Is fathaigh iad, ag briseadh an nasc len gcré, le canadh na gcarraigeacha, clúdach ama orthu.

Bhí cumhacht na cathrach curtha ar fáil l’uiscebhealaí, uair amháin. D’oscail said na geataí go dtí an duibheagán, agus bhí abhainn ann. San uisce bhí dusta, an dusta mín sin, na hadaimh a chruthaíonn an tsibhialtacht.

Ag lorg tuilleadh, d’aimsigh na túir a scornaigh, agus bhlais siad an t-aer fiáin, Bhí an cré ag canadh arís, míshocair sa ghaineamh taobh istigh don ghloine sin atá ag croitheadh, lasta le taibhsí.

Breathnú síos anois, ar an áit ina bhfuil an croí adhlachta ag donnú, agus béil ag dúnadh le caint na gcnámh.

Ag rá arís na focail labhartha— agus iad á n-adhlacadh sa chré.

Seo an áit a thiteann cathair, i monabhar na gcleití, lena héin atá ag neadú. Séasúr i ndiaidh tséasúir, ag imeacht mar smaoineamh nua, aisling na colainne, colainn eile.

Cloiseann sí rud éigin, sa tsíoraíocht lag sin. Rud a lúbann an dromlach air féin agus tugann sé ar ais go dtí do bhaile thú, do chéad bhaile, an ceann gan ballaí ar bith.

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Teacht an Earraigh

It has been such a long winter. Brittle, British.

Seeds hum beneath the cracked earth planted by parents grandparents greatgrandparents Forgotten, nestled against memories of famine

Waiting.

The prodigal sun finally returns

by Kathrina Farrington

Coaxing forth tender green shoots that make sounds that have lain dormant in generations of bones

athléimneacht, marthanaí, buaiteoirí a vast emerald carpet of gaeilge gaeilge gaeilge

Brigid is singing from every newborn blade of grass Spring is coming.

Áilleacht

Rinne mé seanfhocal dom féin; ‘Ní dhéanann áilleacht an obair.’

Cloíonn m’intinn len nath sin.

Chaith mé roinnt de m’airgead cheana ag fáil réidh lena ribí dorcha a fháiseann ar mo smig. Ach fásann siad fós, dubh is dúshlánach.

Smaoiním orm féin is mo mhaimí i mí na Samhna. Bhí an charr stoptha againn chun breathnú ar beirt bhan óg ag an linn taoide, ag baint a gcuid éadai uathu chun dul isteach san muir théachta. Stop bean eile ar an mbóthar le miongháire uirthi ag breathnú ar an radharc. A bheith beo go nádúrtha, is é sin an t-idéal.

Tá súil agam go mairfidh an cuimhne seo.

le Jamie O’Toole

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Brigid’s Young

Two bodies. True spring. Each hoof spreading the cloak further under a warming sun, Light on their feet to honour skinty fia.

by Sophia McDonald

Sleek and shining, White flecks, like constellations painted onto their hides. Momentum carrying them forward, only following new sunshine.

First look at those buds. They’re as light as shadows, Muscles taut in the freshness of the air.

Leaping to bounding, carolling to skipping. Across a field soon to be flush full again.

Brigid by Andrés Murillo

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Feabhra

Oíche, do chorpsa faoin gcrosóg sin, ceangailte le crann feá, ‘s déanta, mar a bhíonn siad, le luachra fite.

Do lámha casta, brí an gheimhridh ort, ‘s ag éalú ó do bhéal, d’anam, d’anam bog

le Aisling Ní Choibheanaigh Nic Eoin

Líon na Bearnaí

by Ferdia Foley

‘Christ, he wouldn’t encourage you to come back, would he?, she muttered as they clambered through the crowds rushing out the doors of St. Ultan’s. A large, pre-emancipation era building originally constructed in a cruciform shape, the church was re-ordered and clumsily squared after Vatican II. The removal of reredos and railings remained controversial amongst many parishioners.

‘Keep the head down and nobody will see us’. Why should she chat with Dervla Farrell when their children weren’t in school anymore? Why listen to Linda Clarke’s incredulous screeching, ‘Is that really you?? My GAWD, I haven’t seen YOU here in ages!!’, when their children weren’t even children anymore? She didn’t know why she was there. It’s Christmas, she thought, you had to do something. Sure, it’s only once a year.

She thought of her parents, their complete and pious devotion. Christmas wasn’t Christmas without a midnight mass. Sunday wasn’t Sunday and Wednesday wasn’t Wednesday. The dim light of a sacred heart stretched far across her childhood. It didn’t mean much to her now, but you have to have something. She was glad they were dead before it kicked off.

Every day for the past few months the Report was discussed on the radio. Even the shock-jocks covered it. ‘Guess this sound! That’s right, it’s the arse falling out of Catholic Ireland!’ None of her children went to mass anymore, and she couldn’t blame them. Only baptised to get into school, Communions and Confirmations were just for the craic. It’d be harder for her to let it all go. But it takes time, she thought, it takes time.

They drove quick out the car park, careening around crowds gathered in circles discussing the Christmas. An awkward priest stood holding mince pies and cold sausage rolls. Not even the Eucharistic Ministers had a kind word to say as comparisons with the recently relocated Father Kearney spread around the yard. ‘He hasn’t half the pizazz as old Baz’, ‘I’m sure I saw him wince at the wine’, ‘Pathetic, that’s right, Pathetic’.

The New Year began and the radio switched back to old news. The M3 was almost complete, despite a decade of protest from environmentalists, academics, and

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artists. ‘Gobshites and hippies’, as one councillor put it. The motorway, which would cut straight through Tara, would slice her husband’s commute in half. It’d be nicer, too, getting into town a bit faster, but she’d never admit that in public. She sympathised with the protestors, even though she couldn’t connect with the more paganistic arguments delivered by tree-huggers and greasy-haired fans of The Hothouse Flowers and Clannad.

‘The motorway which will link the towns of Cavan and Kells with Dublin, will run through farmland within sight of Ardbraccan’s ancient monastic site - she turned down the sound. It was already nearly February and she had plenty else to think about. Her class would make their Communion soon and parents had demanded free tea and biscuits for their next Oíche Eolais, scheduled for St. Ultan’s on the 31st. Apparently catering was Muinteoir’s job, alongside educating their children and freezing herself for two hours a month in a strangely shaped church - for free. After a lengthy phone call, the nervous new priest agreed to provide two tankards of tea, while Muinteoir would bring in the milk. If his mass was bad, nothing compared to that long conversation with Father Hyssop about Avonmore milk’s superiority over Tesco’s Own Brand.

For all her trouble, she was adored by the children. Great healer immaculate, she cleaned scrapes and acknowledged big bruises, ‘Yes that is a very big bruise Daithí, but you needn’t punch yourself to keep it black and blue’. Possessor of great sacred knowledge, Muinteoir answered all questions. ‘Muinteoir, what’s the Irish for Jaffa Cake?’, ‘Muinteoir can fish sing songs or just hum tunes?’, ‘Muinteoir, Muinteoir, Muinteoir! An bhfuil cead agam cáca Jaffa le do thoil?’ What she didn’t know, Google promptly told her. So when the 31st came around, she fulfilled her annual tradition and once again watched the instructional video, ‘How to make a Brigid’s Day Cross (Irish Mythology Explained)’. Prepared for tomorrow’s class, she packed up her things to go home.

Engine on. Heater on. Radio, turned up nice and loud. ‘It’s not just the Hill of Tara that matters. It is but the central focus of a wider and deeply significant cultural landscape’. She tuned it all out, thinking only of getting home quick and enjoying her three private hours between school and St. Ultan’s. Her old dog Phelim greeted her as she came in the front door.

A springer spaniel/labrador, Phelim was a muscle-bound bullet for most of his life. Impossible to walk because of his strength, they’d simply let him run loose out at Tara to terrorise children, petrify sheep, and piss on the famed Stone of Destiny.

He was older now, although not any bit wiser. She thought he might’ve been clipped on the head by a car, and though the vet said he was fine, he seemed a bit absent. A happy dog, but the kind that barks at his farts. Gentler, now he was almost fourteen, he couldn’t be all that strong anymore. She took out the leash and stuck it onto his collar. Minimal resistance, she’d risk it.

‘Ballachmore Bog - Dogs must be kept on lead - Wildlife Reserve, No Shooting Please’. Ten minutes down the road and she’d never been out to the bog. She strolled in quite careful, testing the waters with her thoughtless old dog who seemed quite happy to stroll. Passing by others just finished their walk, she noticed the knee-high dirt on their clothes. ‘Better be careful not to get mucky, might not get home in time for a bath’. Phelim stared on with his simpleton smile and they walked on together, into the bog.

‘How’s she cuttin?’, a small chorus met her at every new corner as workmen wheeled out barrows of stone and joggers jiggled on past her. Dogs scrambled on slanted legs to get a sniff at Phelim, as he snapped at orangey-yellow butterflies with stainedglass window wings. ‘The Marsh Fritillary’, she read on a sign, ‘native to this bog, is the only protected butterfly species in Ireland - please leave them be!’ She loved the smell of the bog, like smoke, stout, and her mother burning her bones before bed by the AGA.

Ten minutes since passing the last JCB and the chorus had faded away. ‘It must nearly be time to go home’, and they wandered until the ground, though still marshy, was bogland no more. The landscape familiar and the sky still the same, she felt suddenly lost in a lonely, strange place. Surrounded by endless fields of grey-green, the night fell quick on the land all around her. She walked until Phelim stopped in his tracks. His first real resistance to the lead, it slipped from her wrist and the dog ran away, bounding into a field. Seeing small figures, pale in the evening, she was afraid the old dog saw a lamb. So she ran and she ran and she tripped and she stumbled and she fell into thick, squelching dirt.

Her phone told the time and little else helpful, coverage is no good in that kind of place. A half hour left until meeting the parents, she sat in the muck with her head in her hands. Machine-gun lungs began thumping the air right beside her. All drenched in water, Phelim’s smile was stretched tight against his dim-witted face. He accepted one rub of relief before taking off again at a pace she could follow. The lead lying useless around her left hand. They stopped at a well, a small hole in the ground surrounded by heavy, black boulders. Freshly bloomed coltsfoot grew

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just out of the water, while a stream fed the oak, yew and beeches around them. While Phelim drank, she sat tracing the markings on a boulder beside her.

‘Brigid’s knee-prints, or that’s what they’ve told me, left there as she drank from the well. I hope you’re not here trying to bless it, y’know, it doesn’t belong to the Church’. She stared up at the long, grey-haired woman wearing a Leonard Cohen t-shirt and filthy, black wellies. ‘This is the daughter of Dagda’s, Brigid the Goddess, you should know there’s no church-folk allowed! And I’d appreciate you removing your dog from her well, there’s great healing and knowledge that flows through that water’. This was clearly one of those odd, hippy women who smoked marijuana, didn’t wear bras, and watched TnaG.

‘I’m sorry’, she said and pulled Phelim away, now apparently infused with great Celtic wisdom. She felt stupid explaining how she’d been lost ten minutes away from her home but the woman’s face quickly softened. ‘I’m sorry for snapping, I get little peace from the new priest above. Looking for a miracle to distract from that business. But of course, I hadn’t realised there was a stray sod there myself, you can blame those feckers for that now as well!’ The woman shouted as if there were spies in the trees. ‘An fóidín mearaí’, she explained, clocking the teacher’s uncertain expression, ‘the sod that sent you out all confused. Denied the burial of their unbaptised children, those poor grieving mothers must’ve gone out to the bog. Walking over those graves can send you down a very bad path’, she leaned over Phelim and gave him a tussle, ‘you’re lucky you had himself there to protect you’. She didn’t think much of the woman’s weird rambling, but she grinned at the idea of Phelim, Knight Errant. Was eating your vomit part of the chivalric code? She wasn’t so sure.

A small cottage, left by her aunt, the woman invited them in. There was a clock, a table, and some kind of sculpture all glossed with the same varnish and made of dark wood. ‘Pieces I’ve pulled from the bog and restored, there’s more to be gotten from the earth than just fuel’. A bit over-dramatic, but she couldn’t resist this strange woman’s charm. From the rafters was hanging a large Brigid’s Cross and noticing her confusion at this straw-crucifixion, the old woman explained, ‘There’s plenty of things we’ve mixed in with religion, but for me the cross means something else. It’s a connection with the women who made them before me. It’s important, I think, to have something’. The Múinteoir agreed and recalled her mother spreading reed in front of their house to protect them from fire and storms. They traded similar stories of Biddy Boys and Brídeóg dolls as she remembered old touches she’d long since forgotten. ‘Whether Christian or not’, the old woman

concluded, ‘it’s more part of ourselves than of them. You won’t catch them doing this craic out in Rome’.

She drove her out to St. Ultan’s with half a litre of milk about ten minutes before the meeting should end. It seemed that some of the parents, with the pandering priest’s full blessing, were intoxicated by the good grace of God. Father Kearney’s spirit cupboard had long been discussed but under the new fawning Father all mysteries were revealed. Embedded at last, Father Hyssop hiccupped as he held the kind woman’s arm and sneered, ‘So you’re the aul bitch that’s been hoarding our well’.

The kids, having learned about the Salmon last year, were fascinated by Phelim’s new, magical knowledge and crowded the dog who stared into space, vacant as ever. Even as Phelim relieved himself against Our Lady Immaculate, young Daithí solemnly whispered ‘uisce coisreacain’ and blessed himself. When Múinteoir sat down with her husband at home, she swore she was mortified, but she smiled as she said it and the dog got two dinners.

‘While sitting by the deathbed of a dying Pagan Chieftain, Saint Brigid weaved a cross out of rushes, and told him the word of the Lord. Before he died, the Chieftain was Christian’. She x’d out of the tab and closed her computer. As she stared at her class of small children, each one smiling with a cross in their hands, she decided to tell them a different story entirely. It was about her own childhood, making circular crosses for mothers in labour, three-pronged crosses for cattle and sheep, and four-pronged crosses to welcome the Spring. She never spoke a single word of the Lord.

After big break, she handed out sheets,

Líon na Bearnaí

Is saoire ______ í Feabhra 1, ag ceiliúradh ______.

________ a thugtar uirthi.

(February 1st is a ______ holiday, celebrating the life of _______. It is known as ________)

Aimsir Spring Robin

by Chris Moody

A Little Chat About Little Books

by Killian Beashel

Erica Van Horn, I always have an audience for my book (Ballybeg: Coracle, 2014)

Francis Van Maele, Achill Island Sheep (Dugort: Redfoxpress, 2019)

If you look at them sometimes they look at you, not that nice is it? I’m not too sure about it myself. Naturally, they often keep their eyes glued to the ground, biting and pulling the grass into their mouths, and that just seems nicer, I think. On occasion they look at nothing in particular, maybe this tree or that, the road, the cars, the brow of a hill and the horizon and beyond that again.

A World Cup without Scotland is like a pastoral without sheep. No sheep!

I can hear a crow scrabbling above on the roof, rooting around for something, some twig in the gutter for a nest perhaps.

They’re two little books about animals. One of the books is about cows, the other is about sheep. At any rate, one book is full of pictures of cows and the other is filled with pictures of sheep, whether they’re about cows and sheep is a whole other matter. They are both small books, and thus ripe for a comparative reading. Van Horn’s features pictures of cows in a field local to her in rural Tipperary. It is entitled I always have an audience for my book. The other book is entitled Achill Sheep, and it ups the ante production-wise by daring to be a hardback, albeit a very little hardback, pocket sheep. The photographs are by somebody called Francis Van Maele.

There is of course the temptation to suggest that they’re both rather simple jokes. They probably are, really.

Van Horn and Van Maele, The Two Vans – in town for one night and one night only! Look at the animals laugh, look at Ireland and laugh, it is all stupid.

On a drive through Connemara as a child, sitting in the back seat of the car, we passed a sign pointing towards a farm somewhere near Clifden. ‘Adopt A Sheep’, the sign read, as if they were an endangered species of tiger. A good enterprising

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farmer making a few quid on the side.

Are these good books? I have only ever engaged with them in very simple ways. Van Horn’s book was often used as an item of decoration, something funny to put on the edge of the coffee table that friends could look at and laugh. It’s a good joke. Van Maele’s book has been a bit different so far. There is no obvious joke in the title so it doesn’t offer quite the same capabilities as a lazy item of household prop-based humour. I’m a lazy reader no doubt.

My housing estate used to be a farm, as is tradition. It would’ve had rolling hills, sheep, a babbling brook. For about a decade the abandoned farmhouse stood in a field at the edge of the estate, gradually growing more ragged with each passing year. When I moved into the house, apparently, you could still see sheep from my bedroom window. I was a young child, and I don’t remember that. The old farmhouse is gone now too and a small development of houses (new ones without chimneys) are in its place. A government minister lives in one of them, apparently.

Why take photos of sheep? You would think they all look alike but they don’t. Some are small, some are big. Some have curled, ornate horns.

I would love to make art for cows, but I don’t think I have the capabilities.

Syncretism

by Maggie O’Shea

See (iii) of Notes for description.

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Spark Bird

by Ursula O’Sullivan-Dale

Out on Lough Beg, where winds cools on the surface of water, the man is looking for a black-tailed godwit. He knows a hidden place among the wet grasslands, trusted to him and his Father only, a gift of the lake. The man hopes to find her there, in wintering feathers.

The godwit is a spark bird, the first bird that kindled his love to watch. From her, he learned to bottle every sound within him and float in the silence, tuned for a specific call. He learned to lose his body among plants and become passive, paralysed. When his Dad first brought him here, she was nesting, scraping short plants together in the muddy grass to shield her young. They were unhatched, their hope of living bound up in a fragile shell. Back then, she had a long bill and a grey back, which burst into orange at the head and neck. Nesting, then, in warm spring water. Now he has come back for her, looking for some feeling, locked in some place from his past. A place where joy was wet and leaking into him. He rarely comes back to the Lough now, and the last few times he’s made it he’s not seen her, becoming lost as he roams through his memories, trying to pull some knowledge of her from them.

Still, he knows she’s not dead. The curve of her wing enfolds his heart, which is still beating.

He can never fully know how much he misses the Beg⁠—as his Dad⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ called it—till he returns, feet wet in the grass, wading into freshwater. Until he meets cattle, grazing on the filmy line of the horizon. Sometimes he looks to the white spike of Church Island, which some say goes all the way back to Saint Patrick. He hears his Dad’s voice telling him this every time he finds that pale shape in his eye, about a saintly passage through a river and into the heart of a lake. This is the only place where he can feel those familiar chords, stroking through the rushes and into him. There’s something half-remembered in the make-up of the plants, that they can sing that sound back to him, as if he were still a child, and his Father’s voice was at some imperceptible distance. The length of a little leg, dangling on a shoulder.

All those years ago, his Father said, That’s it, there, son. The black-tailed godwit. This is the second time I’ve seen her here. I think it’s only us that know about this little spot. Keep that secret well, I’ve a feeling she’s in want of no other visitors.

I will, Daddy.

The boy holds his hand in a small fist and puts the secret in the pocket of his raincoat. He sees the bird his Dad is pointing at and scribbles in his little notebook ‘black taled gotwit’. He never has the heart to change it, looking back on that worn

page, feeling as if to alter anything will rip the memory from him altogether.

He came back to this spot as a young man, before he was due to head down to Dublin for college. He left something of himself behind, then, something to be stored and shared among the grasses, the rootstocks and capillaries. Something to be found again in the companionship of wet feathers. The tiny green cells held his tears for him when, at seventeen, he fell to his knees and felt the first urge of a man becoming to call out to god. When it wrenched from him the urge to find this being and strangle him, and so to lose himself. When thoughts settled within him of defeat and how he might surrender his body, which was young and broad, to the gaping blue mouth before him. That thin beam of time trembles through the Lough now, and runs through his duck-feet. It finds the fine branches of lakewater in him that have their roots, their first roots, somewhere deep in the Beg. As it spreads, he is carried in a boat back to that moment, and to all the moments before and after.

Did you know, love, that our black-tailed godwit returns to the same place every year, to bring new life into the world?

And Mammy, the girl ones have longer beaks to stop the men from taking their food.

His mother nods, glad of her boys’ return. Dinner is ready. Their hands are either cold or wet; the boy is not old enough to know the difference. All he knows is the comfort of his Father’s voice and the heat of the fire.

He comes back now, as a man of his own making, with a son left behind. His wife, who he is pretty sure he loves, minds that precious thing that carries the name of his Father.

In this moment, Friday light swamps the sky, and grey water runs across his eyes. It is lit with carbon, sliding from darkness into pink, forming a dripping ball of white sun on the surface. Thoughts of anything but the present are obliterated, and drain into the everything of water. He blinks, and sees nothing but plain colours of the winter feathers. There is nothing inside him but the brown wet breath of the Lough. He lets the bird come to the forefront of his mind, and silently calls to it, in its own wicka, wicka, wicka. The damp edges of the lake are close but, now that he is here, they seem to stretch beyond and beyond, like an endless skin. Water runs across that skin and weeps into his heart, where it finds his childhood. It opens everything up and he hides nothing. Like a parent, with a lying child, it knows how to make a passage for the truth and force its passing from his lips.

Somehow, soon, everything will feel complete. Once he finds her, everything will shimmer and living will be his again. He must simply wait for it.

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For when the closed shell, buried in the bank of his chest, clicks and opens.

And so he wades, closing in on that primordial spot, simple work for adult legs. He thinks, still, of how much easier this was when there were shoulders to carry him. The more he comes on, bearing towards it, the more he is filled with that euphonious sound. His Father’s heavy footsteps sinking into the many pools of himself, into that first love, that first mud. Not much further now, into the dark water. He is almost swimming, trusting the knowledge of his body, of the body of the Lough, to take him there. He is only strides away from the marshy shores but can’t see land. There is nowhere to go but through himself, his own murky image, which draws towards it all the light of the water. He passes through its shape, a widening shadow. Yes, he can see it, on the other side—right there. The secret spot, the one only Dad could find. He thinks to himself, I am a man now, with a child of my own. I have found it too.

It is only a few feet away. The length of his Father’s body. Stretched ahead of him are those long, long legs. He wonders why now, as feels the last of himself distending, passing out of him and into shadow, he thinks he hears the kettle boil at home, the sound of his wife’s arms winding around his boy. But this cannot be, because there is no other place. He goes forwards. The time it takes for him to find the way is an age of man, of oxen yoked in the field, of backs cracking with labour, a world pulsing with the metal rage of industry.

Before the moment is gone, the spot becomes flooded, and very deep. Or perhaps he has become very small and low, barely breaking through into the clean edge of day. Passing through the corner of his eye, he suddenly sees it. The image is brown, like the softness growing from the skin of a young bird. She dips her long pink bill, its orange colour leaving with summer’s heat. It winds deep into the water, into a darker shade. The spire of a church on a black day. The wind hums through a hundred feathers of grey-brown, a hundred mourners. The colour of a tie that has been tied, too tight, around the neck of a dead man. A face that never looked so serious. That wasn’t his face, his soul.

But he sees it now. In an arched wing, striped black and white in the moments before flight. He is not anywhere. The water and the marsh keep infinite moments. That’s it, son. He did not realise how far he had strayed from the surface. In the tremors of his Father’s voice, which reach out for him through the water like a trembling hand, he sees it. The winter plumage of the bird, at last.

The two sounds are now confused, the signals ringing as one through water. He feels himself return to that silent state, which he knows so well, and waits for that wicka, wicka, wicka.

Fledgling

by Aisling Ní Choibheanaigh Nic Eoin

A child, looking in a steamed mirror, popping jewels of toothpaste into her mouth. This was where you started, the growing-up, grown up you. You aged more with painful events, like the burns you got on your arms when you fell forward into a spring bonfire. That great mass of skin that you couldn’t take your eyes away from, the peeling, the pulling; it went all the way up to your elbows, like a pair of removable gloves. Months after, when you were able to discard the bandages entirely, you sat on the slate steps into the garden, tracing the thick ropes of tissue that went around your arms. They were a deep pink, and shone in any amount of light. You wanted them off you, and took every step you could to ensure that they would one day be off you. You oiled them, buffed them with body scrubs, massaged them with your thumbs. But they remained, and as the years went on, still they remained – on you. As such, you quickly took your place in the community as a cautionary-tale individual; the sort of person that parents tell their children about in an effort to help them avoid your same fate. The sort of person your grandmother would have told you about when you were young, her voice ripe with that strange talent your country has for reducing a person’s entire life to one moment.

This year, on the brink of adulthood, you have given up on the idea of removing them, so embedded are they in your person. You can feel, when you rotate your forearm, these ropes rising and falling as they go over the moving bone. Their weight sits against you, but not in an unpleasant way. Like a new tooth taking the place of an old one; strange to begin with, and then settled so deeply into the bones of you that it becomes normal, usual. You press those arms into the fuel bunker, into the bath where you wash the family dog, into the ground to plant bulbs. You hold them across your chest at night, dreaming of worlds not yet born, of words not yet spoken. Mornings pass, nights pass, and following this same pattern, the months pass. The light increases, the flat space outside your home begins to show signs of movement, that wiggling out of the dirt that all things seem to do eventually.

This evening, while your parents and siblings ready that same spring bonfire, a decade-later version of that spring bonfire that changed your body so profoundly, you sit on a lawn-chair. You feel this changing world as a wave of pink bleeds out from the underside of the sky, loosening those threads that have, until this point in the year, stopped any colour from getting through. You see them, those threads of cloud, reaching and joining the two sides of this verge together – clinging, all sinewy and wet. Looking out to the distant Atlantic, and the grinding of its body against rocks, you watch this spectacle, thinking that the sky seems to be lowering itself towards the earth in the strangest way. Like some spectral vision of atmospheric agitation.

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Its motion interrupted and then repeated again, in a constant push and pull that allows it to advance its position incrementally; until it appears to be just feet above your heads. You stand, excusing yourself, and walk out the side gate behind the house.

Into the field off the boreen, the overturned water trough rests in its usual place, and you sit on it. The skin on your forearms prickles, as if detecting some current that moves over your body, through the grass. You run your fingers over those ropes of tissue, their little dips and bends familiar now. This is when you notice the hundreds of variations that are suddenly visible within the colour brown. In front of you, in the ground, there appears to be an endless number; there are those that are cold from water, the earth; those that are warm in the orange light; those that have mixed with the purples and greens to become something entirely different, like brush strokes have dragged them together, forced them into one another. And from this colour comes a bird, a darker brown than what is behind it. Another follows it, digging at the damp soil around it, taking no note of you. More begin to gather, out from the nearby shrubbery, down from the branches of ash trees, from behind the trough. Beaks bent, eyes glossy, the feathers of their wings scrunched to keep out the weather. Wind cries as it hits your body and weaves its way through the grasses, and when you look up, you see the clouds directly above you, only inches above your body.

The birds make noises that you feel moving in and out of you. How strange, you think, to see such an amount of them here. No fear, no concern over their proximity to you. You lower your body onto the ground to be closer to them, breathing as quietly as you can. Sitting there in the dirt, at the foot of the old trough, you notice the clouds pushing down, almost against the earth. Is there any way to know where you are, body like a worm against the ground? Are you above or below it? You look up, listening out for the waves that move far from you. Feel them crushing strings of seaweed into the sand, pushing shells onto rocks. Some noise disturbs the birds, and they take off in a single group, their small bodies hitting one another as they go. You are left alone, under this flat sky, the shadows of their wings on the inside of your eyelids.

The noise of that water, or the feeling of it, pushing through the ground. Like a great crunching, a tearing through rock, through roots. It pushes up towards you from the shore, pushes against the huge weight of the cliffs and the stone walls that bound fields. Through this ground, cracking it open until it reaches you. You look, unable to see this split, but hearing it. How has this sound come so far? It’s in my mouth, you think, I can taste it. And you do taste it. It is the taste of something in the world cutting through your life, that life that lives in your belly, squishy and beating – the taste of being left behind, or of leaving something behind.

Afterword

by Seán Hewitt

It is the start of the new year in Dublin, and from my office window I can see flocks of geese, and the trees are beginning to outline themselves in red, the buds coming through. As is increasingly the case, the weather is milder than it should be: for the past few mornings, I have left the house with only a light jacket, and the succulent I keep on my windowsill has just begun to extend a long stem of flowers.

As a child, the seasons became a source of some anxiety for me, having picked up on discussions of climate change and environmental precarity. When October came, I would watch out for the leaves to turn, for the first frosts to set in, and only when I was convinced that autumn was with us in its proper form would I find myself able to settle. In the winter, snows became less frequent, and floods took their place. The cycle of the year was coming loose. Just as Clare Ní Lanagáin notices in “Broken Seasons Still Turn”, everything seemed ‘mild, elongated, unresolved’.

The poems, stories and images in this first issue of Aimsir are full of weather, full of the seasons, and remind me of that verbal echo in the Irish word, where time, weather, and the season are all held together. The close attachment that these artworks hold to the world has never been more necessary. They are each devotional, reminding me of Simone Weil’s idea that pure attention is a form of prayer.

What is evident, too, is that the disturbances of the seasons creates a disturbance in us: the weather is registered, unhoming our emotional weather, showing us to be the instinctive, feeling animals we are. There is, as Aisling Ní Choibheanaigh Nic Eoin writes in “Feabhra”, a meaning to winter, a meaning that might be lost if winter is lost.

It has given me much hope to read this first issue, feeling a close affiliation with its writers, artists and editors, and sensing through their close attention a renewed sense of the importance of marking the passing of time, of noticing the world around us, of documenting our interrelatedness: these are important acts in a precarious age, and though we do not know what the new seasons will bring, it gives me hope to know that they will be recorded, considered and given time in these pages.

Aimsir Notes

(i) The Evergreen: A Northern Seasonal was a Scottish seasonal magazine published between Spring 1895 and Winter 1896/7. It was edited by Patrick Geddes and William Sharp (who also wrote under the pseudonym Fiona MacLeod), and published only four issues, one for each season. It is available to read online via the Yellow Nineties 2.0 magazine rack.

(ii) Written in the 1990s, and published posthumously, William M. Roth’s Birdsong is a meditation on the space between religion and myth in rural Ireland. Set in Tipperary, the novel follows the release of a woman from an institution and her life in the care of her complex family. It details her return to the company of birds, and her embodied understanding of birdsong. It is available to purchase from Coracle Press.

(iii) Description of Syncretism - Maggie O’Shea: This is a mixed media piece, utilising linocut printing layered upon intricate prints created using ink and red cabbage cross sections. Through exploring the traditions surrounding Imbolc, St. Brigid and the Celtic goddesses her character seems to emulate, I sought a way of combining natural materials with illustrations of Brigid’s interests. It seemed only apt that a triskelion would appear somewhere upon her person. In her hands she holds blackthorn sprigs; reminiscent of the phrase “spring sewing and blackthorn growing”, which was associated with the Imbolc period and accompanying increases in crop production and animal births. Brigid (and the goddess Danu, upon whom stories of Brigid appear to be based) was associated with a reconnection to nature, as well as wisdom, animals and healing. The fish at her feet is a wild Atlantic Irish salmon, an endangered species in Ireland as of 2022. Above that lies Irish kelp and a bird, images which combine both the natural elements and musicality of Irish tradition. The feathers around her head signify peace and tranquillity, as well as quills, representative of her association with poetry and literature.

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