Ghosts

This haunted land

Shines in the night

By the light of the crescent moon.

Ghosts

Walk in the shadows

Unseen except for that strange mist

Which follows them.

In their hair,

That sad hair which flows

With the wild bleakness

Of their very personal death,

Hangs the reflected light of the heavens.

You see this in the moment of moments

When they rise over you

In the moonscapes,

In the grey midnight,

To tell you of their deep misfortune

And the meaning…

The meaning…

The long lost memories.

You find fear in the truth

That you, of all mortals, must follow,

You must walk that path.

You fear to take it,

And fear, above that alone,

To take the tragic route

Spurned or deceived,

Indecently terminated in the dark,

Left to walk only half visible -

Dead, dead, dead -

With just the starshine in your hair

And the same wild look.

It is not to haunt us they come.

They need to see us,

Cannot bear the parting,

The injustice of it.

We haunt them as surely

As their glimpsed and chilling presence

Terrorises us.

They mouth the words of their sorrow,

Act out the spasm of their woes

In repetitive movements.

They have no substance.

They will not dissolve

And we will not gather them in

Nor blow their dust away.

© BH 1991

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I can't remember the inception of this. Maybe a dozen years ago, somewhere in Aberdeen, if memory serves at all.

I was thinking, then, how we maybe do those in the phantom department a disservice. Maybe we are ghosts to them too. Maybe they are reaching out to us for pity's sake.

What scares the living is the spectral reminder of mortality. But the dead are just like us, unwilling to be gone, trying to hang on to what they've lost.

And we run screaming…