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Banshee
The long, drawn-out howling of a dog
shut up all night inside the auction ring
out back of our B&B scares awake
the owner's child so that she cries
in the room below our bed, a duet
that in my half-sleep seems to carry
beyond Mount Eagle and Slea Head
to my grandmother's Brooklyn apartment
thirty years ago where, back-lit in her chair,
she told me her story of the banshee,
how as a child she heard it wail
through the townland of Kilvendoney the day
the neighboring farmer died; and again
years later she listened to what sounded
like the keening of an old woman
under Sixth Avenue streetlights,
and knew then that no prayer could save
her oldest son lying in a coma,
meningitis working into his brain,
the pain like a small voice rising to a pitch
beyond all hearing — a noise so unlike
the steady hum and beep of machines
that monitored your induced sleep
in the outpatient wing where they carved
the lump from you, as it turned out,
benign, the word soothing as the whisper
this child's mother must use to calm
the fractured music in her daughter's throat,
Shush, shush, it's only an old watch dog,
as moonlight softens the tin roof
outside both our windows, and I draw you
closer to me in our rented bed
and rest my hand on your scarred breast.
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Daniel Tobin is the author of nine books of poems, including From Nothing, winner of the Julia Ward Howe Award, The Stone in the Air, his suite of versions from the German of Paul Celan, and most recently Blood Labors, named one of the Best Poetry Books of the Year for 2018 by the New York Times and The Washington Independent Review of Books. His poetry has won many awards, among them the Massachusetts Book Award and fellowships from the NEA and the Guggenheim Foundation. His critical and editorial works include Passage to the Center: Imagination and the Sacred in the Poetry of Seamus Heaney, Awake in America, The Book of Irish American Poetry from the Eighteenth Century to the Present, and To the Many: The Collected Early Works of Lola Ridge. His most recent work is On Serious Earth: Poetry and Transcendence. A trilogy of book-length poems, The Mansions, will appear in 2023. He teaches at Emerson College in Boston. [See also this link for more poems and information.]
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Kiki Smith, American (born Germany), born 1954; Banshee Pearls (detail), 1991; Smithsonian American Art Museum.