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 …
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
first published in Tidepool
A Summer Father … Here is poetry … interweaving images culled from a wartime childhood with bittersweet memories of a “summer father”. Lynda Monahan
I really liked this poem, Joanna. Feliz Todos Santos ( Tous Saints, All Saints) manana, demain, tomorrow) Diana
I do love it when I get a response from a poem! Many thanks indeed, Diana. Did you get lots of little spooks last night?