NaPoWriMo #29: haunted

The end is in sight! Here's my penultimate poem for NaPoWriMo, which was inspired while I was doing dishes this morning and thinking back to the brief week after my senior year when I worked up at the Roche Harbor Resort with my cousin Sarah. She had been there all summer and I was just passing through, but she worked it out for me to come help her for a few days, since I needed the extra cash. I remember my first afternoon we were working at the Hotel de Haro and she told me how it was supposed to be haunted. There was a sort of thrill to that, a possibility of something supernatural amid the grind of pushing the housekeeping cart up and down those hundred and fifty year-old halls.

Of course, having started out with ghosts, the poem took off in a completely different direction.


I'm Not Afraid of Ghosts

I’m not afraid of ghosts
not your ghosts not mine
those washed-out ephemeral
embodied memories of
pain never put to rest
have no power to possess me
when it is I who embrace them
come pain I say
come do your worst
choke my voice with bitter loss
and unanswered longing
wrap me in icy tendrils of grief
pierce my heart with frosty shards
for I have peace with which to heal
love burning fierce and bright within
until I am warm enough to thaw
even the most wicked winter
of disappointed dreams.