Soundless

Halloween. ‘All Hallows Eve.’ The day when we remember the dead and pay our respects; the evening children ‘trick or treat’ from house to house … dusk, when the line between the physical and ghostly worlds is thinnest and magic shows through …

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SOUNDLESS                                                                      

a house haunted by sibilants
their future a mist of visitation
the past lost by passage through closed doors
a drift of nothingness
through mirage    out of dream
moving down hallways of image
to translucence in a mirror

their names, published on church walls
finger-traced for reassurance
respond with dissolved solidity

no whisper, turn of heel
no stir of breeze or shout of welcome

only a shadow, a change of colour on the air
a hush that greys ambience

they stray along avenues of dusk
detected by a sense of ‘other’
where solitude was:  ghosts
locked by a clock whose hands
hold them haunting
in clouds of cypress housing

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first published in Tidepool

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A Summer Father … Here is poetry … interweaving images culled from a wartime childhood with bittersweet memories of a “summer father”. Lynda Monahan