Ghosts by Sapphire

There are thirteen windows in this room.

I see the tops of trees and sky, my parents

run thru my mind; my father

scurrying like a mouse. My mother is sitting. Why have I come

here, and what do their ghosts

want with me. I know I’m not writing poetry


but trying to build a bridge back to poetry.

I will go home to a hot stuffy room.

I have lived with their ghosts.

The black haired mother, her parents

on her back. We had, all but one, come

to bury her twelve years ago. My father


died at seventy-five, a stroke, my father

myself? Or me, myself—where is poetry,

the feeling I used to have, will it come

in the middle of exercises? Finally I have a room

with windows. Finally my parents

are dead, are ghosts.


How they beat me, left me, laughed at me, are ghosts.

I see him frozen, hurrying, in a picture, my father.

I seldom saw my parents

together. My mother never mentioned my father’s poetry.

I found it after he died. I was in his room

before his funeral. I had come more...

Biography Sapphire

Found at Lyrikline