my sunday poem … # 7

my sunday poem … # 7

This week’s offering is a poem called The Ghost, first published in 1978 when I was living in Norfolk. A ghost is traditionally perceived to be the soul or spirit of a dead person that can appear, in visible form or other manifestation, to the living. If there are indeed such entities as ghosts I have a feeling that  they would be walking in fear and desperate confusion among us in our material world. So I wrote this. 

the ghost

visible world
haunting me still
a chill to my soul
ice-cold fear
like a spinning diamond
in the floating past

pain without pain
the children of time
are lost in the rain
feeling their eyes
and knowing their touch
my unseen presence flees
among life incarnate

the dark grief
that brought me here
and the priestly silence
that finally began
this restless sleep
this endless deep

o I am shapeless
and forgotten
death took me like a lover
and left me as a sailor
a voyager for ever
on the tide’s eternal drift