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21st February, 2025

Friday Poem – ‘The Migration of Ghosts’ by Maggie Harris

Photo of a light house flashing across the rock in the night.

This week’s Friday Poem is ‘The Migration of Ghosts’ by Maggie Harris from her collection I Sing to the Greenhearts.

The Migration of Ghosts In the country where I was born they said the dead couldn’t swim and migration frees you from their ghosts, their constant whimpering on what you should or shouldn’t have done. There in the land of massacre there’s still a scramble to leave, body or no body and some of them hitch rides on mobile phones or tankers while some try floating as they heard it might help with questions of identification. I saw them myself in the Azores, their bones granulated to form coral and even undersea they gleam with what one might describe as a wavering hue. But I was young then and fanciful, and not everything I say is true. Here in my final years I could live nowhere but the sea. I tried the country once and all it did was eat me. So I’ve managed to build a body without bones and these sea breezes are my constant, dress me at their whim, disguise my intent. The jewellery I wear is free. I walk these sands every Thursday and listen to the echoes of my empty feet. The birds can hear it too, even the gulls avoid me. The deafness of old age is misdiagnosed: what’s happening is your hearing is actually sharper, just not the things you want to hear. But you don’t have to believe me, not everything I say is true. You don’t want to hear the desperate bitterness of crabs or imagine the beautiful bones of the boy you loved sprinkled across a foreign shore or incarcerated in some fancy casket his family insisted he have. Still, I listen out for him every Thursday, watching the waves. I sealed his death with a kiss, he has to find me. Sometimes I come to see the lighthouse flash, it reminds me of voyages I wish I’d taken or those I didn’t. In the end all we can do is walk and carry the sands on our feet to leave at the doors of the lonely. But don’t listen to me, I was always being accused of too much fancy.

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Related Books

This cover shows a painting of a wooden house surrounded by lush vegetation and palm trees beneath a blue sky. The text reads: I Sing to the Greenhearts. Maggie Harris.

I Sing to the Greenhearts

Maggie Harris

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