Kate Chadbourne
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Kate Chadbourne is a singer, storyteller, and poet whose performances combine traditional tales with music for voice, harp, flutes, and piano. She holds a Ph.D. in Celtic Languages and Literatures from Harvard where she teaches courses in Irish language and folklore – but the heart of her understanding of Irish folk tradition comes from encounters with singers, storytellers, and great talkers in Ireland. She has been a featured “tradition bearer” in the Revels Salon series and in the Gaelic Roots Concert Series at Boston College. Her music was featured recently on NPR’s programs, “Cartalk” and “All Songs Considered,” and songs from her latest CD, The Irishy Girl, are played on Irish radio programs throughout the country. The Harp-Boat, a collection of poems about her father, a Maine lobsterman, won the Kulupi Press 2007 Sense of Place Chapbook Contest and was published in 2008.
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Brigit’s Woven World
Saint Brigit wore a cloak
woven of sunbeams and holiness,
so light it floated on a shaft of sun
as others hook their mantles onto pegs
when they come home soaked with dew.
She saw fine weaving everywhere –
the bright new thread of a child
pulled taut and knotted
into a family
birds’ nests stitched
of twigs and clover together,
lined with a down of breastfeathers
the green hills stretched
over the loom of the earth
the sky stretched above it
Where she could, she wove the world anew:
the dull tough fiber of hunger
overlaid and blunted
by a gleaming strand of satisfaction
copper wires of blood fury
and jealousy encased in wool
to soften in tolerance and time
Every day of her life she threaded the loom
with the golden yarn of stories
the sky-blue of happiness, the red of her heart
and a milk-white filament of giving
Pull over and under, she teaches,
and make your life’s tapestry of these precious lines:
the warp of now, the weft of eternity
Why doesn’t she just move to Portland?
In the books she loves
and the films she watches
dreams only come true
at the end,
after struggle
and when you’ve given up hope.
You have to earn
your harbor, your gulls wheeling.
You have to deserve
your ferry service to the islands.
No one just hands you
a little house on a hill
near a coffeeshop
where a man called Ted
saves the nicest cinnamon roll
for you.
How are Sea and Ocean Different?
Ocean is the realer thing-
brine with real salt that dries the lips
and sun off the wave knits a web in the eye.
Men spend a life drenched through their waders,
hauling up empty pots, eyeing the chickens.
Good ones hanging offshore; the hull needs work.
Sea is the wind between two planets,
the silver place on ancient maps,
spuming with narwhals and dolphins,
collared with green lace and hung with pearls.
Ships there go with quiet sails,
and the wind is kind to travelers.
I have sailed a life at sea
while my father works the ocean.
