Hi, Hiveans lovers of poetry. Thanks for dropping by!
I hope you can read my poem and it’d be lovely that you left a comment if you feel like doing it. I’d be honored.
This is my entry for the poetry challenge brought by @TheInkWell (check their post here). They are doing an amazing job; check it out and perhaps you’d like to join in.
Ghostly Sighting? (1899) - Image in the Public Domain from the collections of the National Archives
On Behalf of the Poorly Ghost (Petrarchan Sonnet)
You hold your breath; you’re small and unprotected.
You freeze, you stare; you need to play along,
while darkness plays uncanny tunes, her song
of unsaid truths come in her voice inflected.
A soul to linger clad in white, neglected.
Old sheets of silk have roamed the dim for long;
her feetless wonder wandering for wrong,
resembling sour fault and ache rejected.
But what if it’s the child in fear who blames
this dream which mirrors primeval regrets?
Our kind is prone to shape sins innermost;
they fancy dragons for their greedy shames.
They sell their souls to pay for bloody bets,
yet hesitantly quilt the poorly ghost.
About this Sonnet
As I composed the verses I relived many experiences of my childhood, so a child should be there to deal with my ghost.
As a child, like many of us I think, I feared ghosts. The ghosts of some evil people who had undergone horrible deaths would appear at midnight and hurt you because they were still angry or in pain, or just because they were wicked. They’d pull your feet from under your bed—maybe straight to hell. Some ghosts had been probably good when they were still alive; they had probably loved you and all, but who could tell how much they should remember once they had crossed over. Later, like many of us I think (again), I understood that ghosts were not necessarily bad; some of them would come to take care of you, to protect you from evil spirits, or to warn you about something related to the world of the living. At some point, some of us stopped believing in them as something supernatural and began to figure it out: while peace becomes tangible as a white dove and an omen, as a raven (or a chaure in my country), our unfinished businesses become ghosts.
The two-folded idea that the creation of ghosts is a way to cope with the fact that death is always untimely, and that we need to put the blame on somebody/something for all the wrong we cannot fix anymore inspired the composition of this sonnet. I chose the Petrarchan form because it makes the solution (sestet) to the problem (octave) more obvious, thus conveying a powerful effect of realization (if one is lucky enough to achieve it). Needless to say, the iambic rhythm helps sonnets to achieve musicality and euphony, perfect companions to soften harsh matters.