Alan Morrison

Where Banshees Brought Me

Gusts hurled blustery fists outside
  And threw, with sweeps, the rain
That lashed against the draughty glass
  Of the sunken window-pane;

I caught the squalling croon
  Of a thousand drowning choirs;
The wailing caterwauled across
  Plunging downs and dipping mires –

I heard them beckon me outside;
  Their morbid song, lifting in pitch,
Led me from a restive mood
  To the turbid depths of a ditch;

The wails turned to aqueous gasps –
  Into the ditch I tripped and fell;
The rain filled in the dug-up grave
  And there’s little else to tell…

Except that here I drowned with ease –
  My thoughts: the bricks around this well.

Alan Morrison © 2008
recently published in The London Magazine
from A Tapestry of Absent Sitters (Waterloo Press, 2009)