Banshee Riders

A Poem by my father, Kevin Black

Understanding the multi-dimensionality of parents is a life-long endeavour for us: the kids.

A church just outside my father’s hometown of Ballycastle.

I don’t think I’m alone in finding it’s only as one grows older and begins to pass through various phases and stages that other dimensions of a parent’s personality - that have been there along, and went either unnoticed or ignored - become apparent.

I don’t lack for family - it’s one thing I’m extremely well-endowed of in this life. I have, for example, over three-dozen uncles and aunts; which feels like an odd humble-brag.

This post is about a dimension of my father - James Kevin Black - that I’ve come to learn more about, and appreciate deeply, in recent years.

As I was growing up, my father was - to me - just a Doctor. He helped people. He worked long hours, eventually migrating to Emergency Medicine, before working these last 25+ years as a single-handed doctor on an island in Coastal British Columbia.

I didn’t really invest in creating a lot of other ‘dimensions’ to him growing-up. We left Northern Ireland when I was 5 - dad, mom and I. We puttered around the farm in Manitoba together during his gentleman farmer days, while he and the other Northern Irish doctor ministered to the ~1000 people in our two-grain-elevator town (it’s now a one-grain elevator, 500-person town). My brother and sisters entered the scene and life was just one blur of childhood.

When we moved to New Brunswick, he had other “Irish doctor” colleagues we spent time with. They discussed poetry and other things. I thought of poets as bohemian ne’er-do-wells, so I didn’t really class him as one of those. He wore khakis, plaid shirts and a stethoscope, and deployed his curiosity and humour to help people manage times of distress.

We played soccer together - he invited me along to his “Senior Mens” games in rural New Brunswick, where my shins got hacked to bruising. I went off to university and launched myself into career and family and life on the East Coast, while they moved to the West Coast.

Over time I came to understand that he also wrote poetry - and although he’d demur in the face of any accolade to compliment, to this day, he’s also quite “good” at it. He had some pieces published, although I don’t think he ever had much time to put too much effort into that side of things.

In recent years we’ve discussed writing, and poetry, more often. He’s referred me to poets and poetry he likes, and has related stories about meeting some famous poets at writing retreats (that I never even really registered he’d gone to. See above: “bohemian ne’er-do-well ≠≠ not my dad).

So, like all of us - he’s more than just one thing. In retirement, I hope he’ll have time to explore those other dimensions with his legendary curiosity.

One of them is Poet.

With his permission, I’ll share a few of his poems with you over the next little while - each of which resonated strongly with me about our shared home in Northern Ireland - and in particular around identity, and the Troubles.

Today’s is called “Banshee Riders”.

If you are at all squeamish, it may be best to be prepared to revisit this when you’re ready to read it - some of the imagery is quite vivid. I think he treats the subject matter - a car-bombing victim and paramilitaries, tied elegiacally into the mythology of Banshees - respectfully, but honestly.

There is so much layered in it; I won’t try and pre-interpret or annotate it for you. It has multi-layered meaning for me, not the least of which is appreciating some of the experiences - burdens - that have helped shape someone I love and admire.

Here’s to coming to appreciate our parents in more multi-dimensional ways.

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Banshee Riders
By James Kevin Black

I heard it once, the wail of the banshee,
but it wasn't in the dead of night
on the mountainside, it was daytime
in the Craigavon Hospital,
and it was a man.

Market day in Portadown
after the cattle and sheep had been sold
for filling or fattening somewhere,
and money had changed hands,
cheques, handshakes, auctioneer's slips,
a man and his son heading out to the
Land Rover in the car park,
open the door, turn the key,
boom,
the hot explosion of knife-edged
words and hard grudges packed under
the floor with the freeing forces
of Semtex explosive, mixing the inanimate with
the living until all is dead, shredding
the legs of a man until they look like
the tail of a horse.

A grey horse running in the breeze
tail spread on the white sheet of a
casualty bed as I look on,
the Senior Registrar shakes his head and
holds up his hand, wordlessly stopping
the urgent kinesis to save and retrieve
the man, gasping like a fish on the riverbank,
hooked out of water mouthing,
and the absurd thought is for a priest,
not a Catholic priest for this Protestant man,
but the priest, the instrument,
the small black truncheon used by fly fishermen
to deliver a firm, well-aimed tap
to the head of a salmon.

In the waiting room his son screams,
it's the sound of his father's soul
being pulled through his throat,
it's the cry of the Banshee ringing out
over Craigavon, spreading
into the country side and villages,
touching the places of violent death,
the frosted glass of a front door,
a minibus carrying men with canvas
lunch bags to work on a building site,
a grocer turning tomatoes in the shop
window to ripen
teenage boys riding cars like wild horses
through the arroyos of West Belfast.

Wild black mustangs carrying Banshees
kicking up great sods of earth from culverts
under country roads,
galloping horses pulverizing pub windows
into myriads of glass spears
with the wind of their tails,
and with their breaths they sear the faces
of any that look on,
as they go galloping, galloping,
galloping through the country.