Anam Cara

THE BANSHEE’S* GROTTO

After a photograph by Fergus Bourke

The…bean sí is a solitary being…

—PATRICIA LYSAGHT

I heard her across the river crying; a neighbour was dying.

—PADDY O’DONOHUE

The tear is the anticipation of the eye’s future.

—JOSEPH BRODSKY

The messenger comes from that distant place

Beside us where we cannot remember

How unlikely it is that we are here,

Keepers of interiors not our own,

Strangers in whom dawn and twilight are one.

When the black door opens, she often appears,

Keeping her distance from the house of grief,

Circling it with her cry until her tears

Have cut a path to the nerve of a name

That soon will stand alone on a headstone.

No one has seen her face or can fathom

Why she comes so far to mourn a stranger.

She is no Rachel weeping for her children,

No Cassandra doomed to remain unheard,

She is the first voice from the other world.

It seems the camera’s eye caught her form

Hunched inside a waterfall in Mweelrea.

Is it there she collects tears of delight

Sure that death is bright, or worn down with grief

Must she drink from her Conamara Lethe?