Hungry Ghosts And Thirsty Spirits
(a sonnet)
What gift could the dead of the living want
if not to pour again the living's light,
that whiskey warming throats of dreams they haunt;
to sing, to laugh, to lose their drowning night.
My dead are old yet various and new,
the dancing sparks of a youth that ran away.
The love we had so tenuous and blue
flickers out the past and so transforms the clay;
but when you come you paralyze the soul
with heart-remembered cold like glacier melt;
a frozen thing so trapped by pure control
will feel the same negation we once felt.
Take back the miseries living in your eye.
Don't bring me where the sun forgets the sky.
October 2021
(with apologies to Poe and the entire 19th Century)
a little something for All Hallows, at dVerse Poets
Images: Styx, © Marius Lewandowski Fair Use
Author and title unknown, via the internet. Fair Use
