Ghosts

I was just thinking one day - what makes ghosts scary? They can't really do anything

What do we have to fear from the dead?

Those whitish wisps that rise from blustery tombs,

have no power, they cannot maim cannot

take you to their no-place in the halls

of splintered wooden mansions.

 

Perhaps what they alone possess is

that dark cave in the cliffs of our minds

and, there projected, remind us of our death

(our temperature, our eminent departure)

frighten us into refractions of nothingness,

horoscopes written in the vast and ludicrous Beyond.

 

The one place all must cross to, some therefrom return

but men are liars and truth is hard to discern

no one sees the southerly side of those nimble saplings

that stand as barricades,

the thousand scions of the Tree of Knowledge

 

The fruit on this cold North front has frozen and fallen

the split hull the spilt seeds

on fertilised soil, on fouled roads

to take root, perhaps, and grow?

 

Only to out live us as we ourselves are ghosts again.

Reviews

[Andromeda]

interesting/intriguing!