Thirteenth week of Lockdown- woke wondering if I were a ghost.
I am too diffuse, fill the air like smoke
glide around empty rooms, feeling immaterial .
You would think it would be easier existing as ghost,
airborn, iridescent as summer rain,
but I am weightless only in mass -my psyche is ballast.
To be a ghost means to live with the self undiluted.
Imagine who you are, but magnified.
I am too much at times,
the condensed quick of myself,
like a perfume oil or a 100 percent rum.
Nothing touches me, and no-one.
And if they did, I am so tissue skinned
their fingers would go right through me.
At best I am inspiration, contain light,
but adrift and nebulous, like mist
all abstract antipathy and desire,
and invisible
(who sees the ghost but the haunted?)
I pull desperately at my own arm with this poem
and claim
I am here, I am here.
About the Author: Anna Saunders is the author of Communion, (Wild Conversations Press), Struck, (Pindrop Press) Kissing the She Bear, (Wild Conversations Press), Burne Jones and the Fox (Indigo Dreams) and Ghosting for Beginners (Indigo Dreams, Spring 2018). Anna has had poems published in journals and anthologies, which include Ambit, The North, New Walk Magazine, Amaryllis, Iota, Caduceus, Envoi, The Wenlock Anthology, Eyeflash, and The Museum of Light. Anna is the CEO and founder of Cheltenham Poetry Festival. She has been described as ‘a poet who surely can do anything’ by The North and ‘a poet of quite remarkable gifts’ by Bernard O’Donoghue.
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Image Credit: Julia Margaret Cameron “Julia Jackson” (1867) Digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program.
As It Ought To Be 