Challenging Poetry

ghostly gossip

his mother dreams him,
tall and lean,
with the brown eyes
we never saw,
the laugh we never heard,
the words he never spoke.

he gossips with her—
I met Grampy, he says,
he has such a sense of humor
now that the Alzheimer’s
isn’t eating him away,
and she nods.
she never met the Grampy
our mother knew,
but she heard stories.
he was a different man
just before he died.

I love you, she tells him,
the memory washes over her
of the ventilator
moving his tiny body,
of the monitors
measuring his heart,
of the glue she washed
from his head
after the EKG told us
he was dead.
we have a new house.
you’d love your little brothers.

I know, he says.
I miss them, but they
were excited to meet you,
to live. he smiles,
but he doesn't reach
to touch her.

I miss you, she tells him.
and he says, I love you,
Mama, and he fades—
the dream ends—
and she wakes to the world
where she’s the mother
of five children,
four living.

This was an interesting prompt, because it feels like I always am writing ghosts or writing about ghosts, or writing papers about the use of ghosts in fiction--especially in the past few weeks. But I thought about a dream my sister told me about . . . so I went here.

After reading Christopher Roy Denton 's ghostly poem "Let's Hope Ghosts Are Not Real" "Invalid Entry" , I was inspired to play off of his idea of going to children's poetry--but it ended at a darker place than I thought it would when I started:

let’s hope, today, the ghosts are real,
and bring them home to play.
we’ll float behind them through a door
and tap across the attic floor
‘til Mama tells us: Stop! no more!
and we just fade away.

let’s hope, today, that ghosts are real—
they’ll teach us all their jokes.
we’ll write BOO! GOTCHA! on the wall
and Sis will shriek and wail and call
but Mama won’t see it at all—
and tell Sis not to hoax.

let’s hope, today, the ghosts are real,
but that they leave tonight,
or our closed eyes will see the gleams
of ghostly orbs and hear the screams
that haunt our sleep with nightmare dreams—
please, Mom, keep on the light.