In Ireland, faery-tales weave through landscape, history, and present.  Beyond whimsy, there is a strong, underlying respect and acknowledgment of faery power. Often, I heard, “never piss off the faeries.” Yeats associated faeries with mystical explanations for unanswered, and often painful, questions. I hiked to a physical place called the “Faery Bridges,” otherworldly natural earth arches covered in clover and wildflowers bowing over crashing ocean, and as I sat here, snippets of this poem began.

Hayden is Poet Laureate and award-winning Humanities Professor. Featured in dozens of journals and anthologies, her debut collection, American Saunter, is forthcoming this year (FlowerSong Press, 2024), followed by her second, Old World Wings (Wild Ink Publishing) in 2025. She lives with her family and rescue babies, including a special blind, three-legged pup.

W: windychickenpoet.com
I: @windychickenpoet
F: WindyChickenPoet

Judge’s Commentary:

On first glance, “The Faery Bridges” by Amanda Hayden, transports the reader someplace else. With its justified-right placement, the reader is transported to the land of the sidhe, the Irish faery folk who dwell unseen within the forests and mounds between human and spirit worlds. Hayden’s lush landscape evolves in early lines where the power of surprising line breaks and enjambment transform nouns into verbs: “firelight / your woods,”, and “magic mushroom / us”, and “pollen dust / these violet wildflowers.” The reader is caught up Hayden’s musical language and imagery, a spell almost unto itself: “…dance / over the drumlins and burlap briar, hum / your wingspans like starlings, shapeshift / against clear light of sky, hobnob, bewitch / us, spin dew into shimmer…” 

One of the compelling conflicts raised in this poem is what is the intention of humans toward the world in which the sidhe dwell: “give us stumbling humans reason not to disturb / your paths, not to uproot your nestled dwelling / places, magic mushroom / us into fearing your faery vengeance…” The solace and spiritual communion found in nature sought by the speaker in this poem asks for a reason, a sign perhaps, that humans should not destroy these worlds. Faery vengeance, whatever it might be, is the price humans would pay for destruction of these wild places. 

The speaker asks the fairies to take away or reduce the suffering of the human world: “…weave / soft solace ribbons into dark corridors / of grief’s caverns… / some wave of magic wand / what was lost is now hand / in hand with the ‘water and the wild’ / a delightful, clovered world / where there is no weeping.” In a note at the bottom of the poem, Hayden alludes to “The Stolen Child” by W. B. Yeats. In Yeats’s poem, the speaker invites a human child to live among the faeries to avoid sorrows of the human world. Hayden reverses this call, asking instead for faeries to replace “what was lost.” Through the eradication of grief and weeping, with a return to innocence, the bridge between human and faery folk becomes tangible. 

The surprise she creates compels a reader to delve more deeply into the relationship between humans and the spiritual and natural worlds, especially as embodied in cultural folk lessons. In doing so, Hayden seems to create a desire for peaceful co-existence with spiritual and natural mysteries in a destructive human world. There is much to admire across “The Faery Bridges.” I thank the poet for transporting me.

~ Dawn Terpstra, Poetry Editor