GHOSTS
“Ship of the body, ship of the soul, voyaging, voyaging, voyaging”
Walt Whitman
once upon a time
ghosts
left the ocean
;where they had
been living apparently)
beached themselves
came ashore
hard times ensued
for despite
absence of life
they came weighed
down with mythology
and much allegory
libraries
on their backs
full of regimes of rules
such as touch
touch
no one was allowed
to touch them
except the women
and this in special circumstances
part of the process of conversion
to a religion called hypocrisy
but some of their women, in turn,
did not fit, I know of some,
well at least one,
who tried to
return to the sea
but she
has changed, and so
this was
tragically unsuccessful
we cannot deny
that we heard the voice
of the sea in her beautiful death song
I say “we”
but this is, of course, something
of a presumption, imagines
a process of transformation
beyond stretch
of the imagination
for you may
have become conditioned to forget it,
want to not see it,
but I am still
ghost at heart
this is still
ghost song
these words
ghost too
you
can read them, speak them now
but when ghosts first
arrived in force
it seemed like
they were speaking in tongues, like
they were just stringing sounds together,
that their language
was thesaurus
and now
for long, long
having become rooted, having learnt
to build, and (best of all)
how to dig
the ocean has finally
broken its silence
has told the land, the Universe
since they have tried to deny, endeavored
to forget,
inch by inch, foot by foot,
city by city
it is returning for them
I sit on my stoep so very far inland
waiting for the first drop of sea
to make it
to my door
a race
between the ocean and
natural causes
find this amusing:
irony
one of those styles, postures, tropes
we must have carefully packed
in the original bag