I Saw A Ghost Today

 

I saw a ghost today.
A shadow in the shrubbery
a lurker behind the shed.
A floater in the corner of my eye
or am I growing a cataract
like everyone I know
mistaking angels for ghosts
seeing something where there’s nothing.
 
My father said he had a guardian angel
and his name was Joseph.
Father talked to Joseph.
Such intimacy, like the whisper of a lover.
Maybe I have one too.
 
Call me a cynic—I looked it up.
But why wasn’t Joseph watching over him
when he lost two fingers in an auger.
Or when he rammed a nail up his foot—
a rambunctious boy—
and nearly died of blood poisoning.
 
I thought I saw a ghost today.
An anomaly in the fog
A lurker in the lilacs

When in the doorway bloomed.

Do I just flat out ask—

Hey! What’s your name?

Written for Shay's Word Garden using words from her word list taken from "The Waste Land and Other Poems" by TS Eliot.  And for d'Verse's Open Link Night (with a little twist of Whitman's lilac). And it's a secret (for Poets & Storytellers United) I guess I don't mind telling now as my father is with Joseph.
 
 

Child's Play

The pictures on the staircase rearranged themselves in the night

           or so she thinks.

The carvings in the wooden beams that support the entry to this old house

are mathematical in design and impossible to sand

            or so it seems.

My ears sing and I go to the woods to hear the crow and found a skull

and a rack and remember that which was upturned in the garden

and thrown into the ditch, but they keep coming back, like playful ghosts,

            or so I fear.

First it was her great-grandmother’s portrait

moved from top to bottom. Each night another moved

until the last morning the wall was empty.

            No one sees what she can see.

The dog barks, and the moon turns red, an eye of blood,

the camera flash, a migraine, a socket at the keyhole.

           The dreamwheel in my head.

My family pictures don’t rearrange themselves. I hang them where

I want them and they stay put. If a hook come up empty,

dust coating the wall behind where something hung,

            it was on someone else’s stair.

I retain the brass chalice my father used as an ashtray for his cigars

and saved the butt of one half-smoked.The wrapper crumbles in the bowl
but the blackened tip is soft from his lip 

            or so it seems. 

The boy runs for help with ash in his hair, a rattling in his pockets.

Fire smoldering undetected beneath the surface of the peatlands

broke free in his excavating.

            A tooth in his pocket. 
On the final night of the wolf moon her ancestors were piled against the wall

at the bottom of the stairs.

            I dreamed I was her and saw them there.

This is posted for Brendan's challenge at Earthweal, the new platform for discussion of climate challenges. The ghosts of what was, what might have been and what might yet be. Comments and suggestions are welcomed!

The Wake

Someone poured a stein for the deceased

and set it on the mantle.
It had warmed but wasn’t flat.
The sun danced off the lake
which should have been ice-covered
but was as bare as the hands
wrapped in a rosary.
Let them wonder that you walked
amongst their grieving
and finished your final beer unfettered.

 For Brendan at Earthweal, poetry for a changing world.

The Ghost of Red Rover (Friday Flash 55)

The girl's locked in the outhouse,
a boy climbs a tree.

Hiding in the brambles,
two maybe three.

Merry-go-round twirls,
ribbons in her hair,

teeter-totter trembles
with a weight that isn't there.

A wistful wind whistles
through the lilac hiding place,

telling of those who huddled there
when they were young and scared.



This is a Friday Flash 55 for the G-Man. If you write a flash piece on Friday, let him know. This is written in rememberance of playgrounds with steel slides and wooden teeter-totters. Playgrounds that were a refuge and a curse, playgrounds that instilled bravery when we were young and scared.