This Week's Poem of the Day

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This Week's Poem of the Day is taken from Gerard Benson's forthcoming collection, A Good Time (due for publication in August 2010).



GHOSTS   

Ghosts lived in the churchyard. On winter afternoons
they lined up by the wall to watch us
playing hopscotch or he or just staring,
all sorts of dead people, women and men,
and the cholera children. You could see faces
hovering there. From the school railings
to the graveyard was sixty-four long strides.
I counted them. The railings were spiked
and black.
        Once I saw a baby in a cloth,
floating. In summer there were no ghosts
or they stayed underground. But one time
a beggar woman came to the green.
Someone gave her food. She put it in her pocket.
For later on, grinning. Old Mister Crowther
said he knew her. She’d died years ago.
Showed us her grave one evening , all overgrown
with a bare patch where she must have got out.
I wondered if she’d taken her lump of cheese
on down with her, and her piece saved for later,
and whether she might be munching it now.

The schoolyard railings looked like a row of javelins,
with room for a tennis ball to pass between,
or a mum at playtime to smuggle an apple.

— Gerard Benson, A Good Time (Smith/Doorstop, 2010)

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The Poetry Business receives financial assistance from Arts Council England.