Live Encounters Poetry & Writing April 2026
All The Banshees Are Flying, poems by Marcella Remund.
All The Banshees Are Flying
In great-granny’s day, our family had its own banshee,
a cloaked little woman always combing wild red hair,
eyes red-rimmed from constant weeping. She kept
to the woods, flitting here and there among bracken.
Seldom would they see her until one day they’d hear
her shriek, run outside to find her flying circles
round the house and know a son far afield,
a daughter, father, or newest babe had slipped
through the veil. Their own wailing would begin.
Now banshees are everywhere—so many dying
or dead—flying frantic circles above Congo, Ukraine,
Gaza. They weep for Russians tripping out skyscraper
windows. They slog through jungles soaked in rain,
deep in the Amazon, mourn river dolphins, golden
tamarinds. They scream in American schoolrooms.
They bluster and caterwaul where First People keep
a tenuous grip on ancestral homelands. Their cries
for the planet Herself, we mistake for squalls.
We’ve closed our ears to the banshees, shuttered
windows and doors. We hide behind a deafening,
constant din we make with our machines. We talk
Ouroboros
What if there is no magic in the dragon
devouring itself? Just a hint we can’t have life
without death? Best to hitch your wagon
to the facts. Hours and days all speed on
toward a dark doorway, to Atropos’ knife.
There is no magic in a hungry dragon.
O happy oblivion, we skip along
as if we have forever. We see the night
ahead, the way grown dim, our wagon’s
wheels half off the road. Until at last one
day we can’t step up. We fall, fail, can’t right
ourselves. And there’s the dragon
waiting, where we, like babes again,
come full circle, whimpering for the light.
There was never magic in this dragon—
just a swallowed tail, a temporary wagon.
© Marcella Remund
Marcella Remund’s poems have appeared in The Briar Cliff Review, Jabberwock, Poetry Ireland Review, Pasque Petals, Banyan Review, Sheila-Na-Gig, Quartet, Live Encounters.net, South Dakota in Poems, and other journals and anthologies. She is the author of four poetry books, The Sea is My Ugly Twin (2018), The Book of Crooked Prayer (2020), Hysterian (2025), and Stroke, Stroke (forthcoming in 2026), all from Finishing Line Press. You can find more about Marcella at www.marcellaremund.com.