To the Well was inspired by the poem’s opening line, “When I asked the way to the well people knew what I meant, and at last I found the place.” There is healing to be found in water, thus motivating me to respond in as simple a way as possible.

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​St Brigid's Well

by Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin

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i

When I asked the way to the well people knew what I meant,

and at last I found the place. There was a tree

with rosary beads and white paper

twisted around the branches. I watched a girl

who arrived just after me wearing pink trousers

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and bright red sandals. She came in from the road, she stood

and prayed and reached out touching a stone, then moved

a few feet to the right and did it all again. Just there,

the path was a short cut from the road to the houses,

people passed with their shopping, heading home;

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one woman with a child, I heard her saying

to the child walking along in her school uniform,

'It's for all the little babies that passed away.'​

I wrote her words down that same evening, to be sure

I had the truth. It was three in the afternoon,

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Wednesday, in the month of June. I had caught her answer

to the question I didn't hear, in among the voices,

the cars on the road, the soft slap of the sandals

the silent visitor wore, the children coming from school.

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ii

Well, I thought, who needs apparitions?

but they came anyway, in spite of me,

rising like steam out of a dark patch on the road,

or more like the burning smell

from a dark patch on an old door. 

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If I wanted a map that would just show the wells,

the culverted streams, the short cuts, they came,

they congregated, they insisted, 'What about

the wall where the girls played one-two-three-O'Leary?'

they said. I said, 'Why do you want me to put that in?'

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'Or Lovers' Walk?' they said. I gave them back their stare:

'What about the swan?' said I, 'I saw her just now in my search,

so close to me, through a gap in a high wall,

her head, her bending neck, white feathers of one wing?'

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How could she nest up there, and seem at ease?

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but when I turned to leave behind the dead-end

and come down again beside the factory wall,

I heard the mill stream splashing downhill,

inside its prison pipe, out of the brimming pond

that I had not seen. Could I have forgotten

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the excess of water? the excess of all the stories

I might have heard, as I searched for St Brigid's well.

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I