The Loud Sister

Not she whose mortal beauty doomed her breath,

Nor she whose name the trembling poets fear;

But Euryale, whose cry outlives the death

Of bright-haired Medusa, rings the ear.

Her voice — a brazen blade the night must hear —

Goes keening through the caverns of the west;

When Perseus fled, it followed, sharp and clear,

A storm of grief no granite could arrest.

Immortal-born, she could not share the rest

That closed her sister’s ever-sleeping eyes;

So rage and mourning in one throat were pressed,

A sound the startled constellations prize.

Still through the dark her iron lament runs:

The loud one lives when quieter grief is done.