Banshee

…that woman whose cries unwound and wouldn’t be comforted by love or a lover’s body, by childhood or any piety.

Margaret Gibson, Country Woman’s Elegy

Her sound unwinds in the night
defiant of measure or boundary
freed of daylight and deafness,
world-grief mourning over rooftops,
moors, fields, churches, graveyards.
crying that shreds distance, kills sleep,
disavows the sun, puts death
into hills and valleys, its children
and their mothering. It is life loss
baring sorrow’s roots, denying
joy, destroying future promise.
It is anguish and fire’s anger
stirring all to consciousness
of time gone past retrieval.
A death-stricken sound,
the banshee’s wind-born wail
rends the heart of life in time.
allowing life to rise again.