Chatting to Ghosts: Processing Through Poetry

Back in the late summer of 2021, my grandfather Frank Simmons passed away. I don’t necessarily think he believed in legacy, but the impact it has left on my family is still somewhat unquantifiable. He picked up pieces in all of our lives and loved all of us so fiercely, but wasn’t interested in any kind of recognition. He didn’t do anything because he *meant* to change lives, and never spoke about duty or honour; he did these things purely because he wanted to.

I think I’ve spent too much of the aftermath trying to understand death rather than processing it, and both quests are some distance from their conclusions. There’s one thing I have found though, which I know Frank understood too; there’s no point in trying to approach death logically. Better to let it lead you up the garden path to some kind of inner reckoning, and for me, that reckoning comes from poetry.

I wrote this poem in July of that year, shortly after visiting Frank in a dementia home and not long before his passing. It’s easy to use poetry as a balm for things, or a mask, and when I started writing this that’s all it was ever intended for. But I remember being surprised at how it charted some kind of discovery for me.

Reading it back now, I’m not sure I feel any closer to the process of healing than I did then, but maybe that’s fine. I believe that it’s okay for poetry to have one context and exist in its own microcosm, never offering anything beyond its immediate confines. It doesn’t need to express anything outside of the finite time it sketches for itself; it can just breathe for as long as it needs to.

I’m back at Frank’s old house this week, chatting to the ghosts that leap off the books in his study and feeding off the beautiful surroundings. I guess I do feel his presence here still, not so much in empty rooms as in his own bespoke personcraft, and it’s that which inspired the poem originally more than anything else.

That’s the emotional explanation, anyway. The less glamourous one is that this poem hasn’t been accepted by any journals, but I don’t feel ready to lose any of it yet. It’s entirely possible that in several years I’ll look back and all of it will feel superfluous in the shadow of some concrete, effervescent spiritual awakening. But until that time comes I’m neither happy reappraising it or sitting on it, so that’s why I’ve decided it needs to go somewhere.

You’ll find the poem below. If you decide to keep reading then thank you; it’s not for me to say whether it submits anything valuable, but hopefully it’s at least evocative of some kind of realisation.

Summer Dreams (After the Care Home)

When we arrived the house shimmered
at the end of the drive.
The lamplit windows danced like
whipped candles, the sort you’d
have to sell your mother - or at least
a heart bypass - for. There was no going back.

The perfect specks of grit under tread
as we approached bounced like
the last memory of skylarks, dropped
on their migration
to that place
impossible to see

It’s weird how it comes back to me now;
as though this plot,
this land, is screaming. Every
yellow blade, every inch of
ash shuffling me to a vista
where pale stars melt ghosted trees.

That summer spurned through me like a
goblin-manicured vision, picking holes in
lungs and heads and hands
until we knew that time was up.
I hadn’t even entered the house
yet.

***

Once I’d peeled back the grit from eyelids,
the folded flame of your past stared
at me through baked vinyl decks,
brushes with decent years left
embedded in tin Spitfires, secreted
amongst greying travel brochures

Berlin, Boston, Oman. The Severn Tunnel.
All there, all capturing a dust-pinched
shadow from your vanishing booth,
decorated with water-coloured alps and
nifty diatribes about modern religion,
how you *knew* god could be in all of us.

For all that you taught and lamented,
there seemed so much more to give -
cracked lines to
a certain knowledge -
There is little room for the answers
you can’t give now.

***

That was your old life. Your new one you’ve
half made-up, half remembered,
100% dreamed. In those peaceful,
lilting arrests you remember dreams and
find yourself there again: a person who
still knows his heart and loves his past.

It’s hard to believe in the house, and
in the lives we all weave between now -
waiting for the shivering light on the drive,
the quickening stars, the second-guessed trees,

None of which you’ve truly forgotten.
Long walks through spangled
mind palaces are my retreat as much as
your past.

They can’t wither with time or anything else.