The Inner Circle

Cailleach Bhéara,

Veiled One of stone and storm,

Hag of the mountain spine,

Keeper of winter’s law,

I feel you moving now

This storm carries your name

Snow and ice moving across stolen land,

wind crossing barriers like breath.

You shaped mountains before nations existed.

You know the difference between law and cruelty.

Old Mother of frost and reckoning,

you who shaped the mountains by dropping them

from your apron,

you who freeze what has grown monstrous,

I ask you to enter this hour.

Look upon this land

where borders cut like knives through flesh and kin,

where cages are named “policy,”

and fear is bureaucratized, stamped, filed, enforced.

Look upon the cold machinery

that calls itself order but creating chaos

while tearing children from warmth and love,

while hunting the poor beneath uniforms and acronyms

like sport.

White hoods of their grandfathers

exchanged for red hats and face masks

Cailleach,

you who know when a season has rotted,

who know when a structure must fall

so new life can root—

Lay your ice not on brown bodies,

but on the systems that devour them.

Freeze the gears of agencies built on terror.

Crack the glass halls of the DHS.

Still the grasping hands of ICE

until they can no longer move.

Let this storm be a binding spell,

a pause enforced by snow and silence,

a reminder that no empire outpaces winter,

no authority outruns the earth herself.

Grind unjust laws into meltwater.

Return stolen breath to the people.

Let what was built without soul

be dismantled without mercy.

Cailleach of the turning year,

teach us again the old truth:

that winter is not punishment,

but opportunity for correction.

That cold is not cruelty

but honesty.

We ask for destruction

of tyranny.

Not for vengeance,

but for rebirth.

Come, Grey One.

Sit in the heart of this storm.

And when the thaw comes,

let it come clean.

~ Rae Brassell