Consorting With Ghosts - Sept 12 2026

 

Consorting With Ghosts

Sept 12 2026



The hands of the clock circle.

The same 12 hours

repeating for all of time

as if nothing ever changed

nothing ever will.

Just as living day-to-day

feels like my life is nicely settled

and I’m here to stay.

But when I look at the pictures

taken before she left us

I think not of circles, but of lines,

and the long gulf of time

between now and then

hits unexpectedly hard.

Because those eyes gazing out

see nothing

stay fixed,

that young and hopeful face 

has long ago

decomposed in its grave.

So instead of fond reminiscence

I’m struck by the shock

of what’s been lost,

and what should be a treasured possession

becomes a cruel simulacrum instead;

revisiting

too hard to bear.

And for her voice, the same

if not more unnerving.

Because sound is the primal sense,

the first that makes a fetus stir

in her mother’s womb.

Her own words

as if she could return from the grave,

as if the finality of death

was negotiable.

Before technology

acceptance must have been so much easier.

They would have even thought it unnatural, I suspect

to consort with ghosts

by summoning their pictures,

indulge in false hope

by resurrecting the dead.

Let them be, they would have said

as life goes on

and memory fades.

You sent them off, and paid your respects,

now let them rest

just where you left them

less than 12 hours ago.

In that the past has never been more accessible, the last 150 or so years have been exceptional in human history. Photography and sound recording created a very different relationship with our ancestors. As well as recent history.  (Not to mention our younger selves!)

I know that most people treasure the pictures and voices modern technology preserves. I feel differently. I don’t like to listen or look. As the poem says, instead of fond reminiscence, I find them cruel reminders that just make the truth harder to bear.

Of course, there have been other equally exceptional changes. For one, the concept of time itself. In modernity, time is linear:  things change, people move, progress is assumed. (Granted, a sawtooth graph; but we still assume things will get better, that our children will have better lives.) While in the past, time was cyclic:  life didn’t change; people lived as their ancestors had for generations. They rarely even travelled more than a few miles from where they were born.

The poem won’t quite work if young readers can’t picture an analogue clock. Or is this asking too much? Like expecting them to know what a pay phone is, or even an actual floppy disc!

The closing line could be read as me contradicting myself. Because in a changeless world that keeps circling back on itself, the dead are never really gone. While in the modern world — scientific and post-enlightenment — the finality of death has probably become easier to accept, not harder; pictures or not. (The only trouble with this is that science has not made religion and superstition disappear. Many modern people still cleave to a belief in afterlives: reincarnation, heaven, whatever.)  Tribal societies — ancient ones, as well as contemporary nomadic hunter/gathers — often believe their ancestors are still with them: watching, guiding, and judging. They honour, commune with, and even worship them. So even without being able to revisit photos and videos, the dead may be even more present for them than for us.  . . . But then, differently: perhaps not so much in grief and mourning, as in matter-of-factly present in a conscious and vital way.