GHOSTS

Taken from Middlebrow online magazine

Ghosts of Haworth

Vivid autumn courses, bringing unwelcome news
of unknown but compelling forces
shrouded in time and season,
a world where myth and reason collide,
the magnetic pull of frost and fog,
bleak landscapes where gothic heroes speak.

A timeworn house and desolate downs, set amid
the rushing and moaning of the wind,
hear tortured souls howling from parchment pages.
November bites, draws in the chill of winter,
overnight frost and snow settle and fall,
thoughts and feelings call and clash along the way.

Those most encumbered ones of Haworth,
all slumbered before their thirty-eighth summer,
unconventional, unwell, grave and quiet,
living in a limbo close to hell, clinging to one other,
happiness not brought about by change
on the bleak moors of Yorkshire.

Walk in the wilderness, the featureless and solitary
that haunts with hints of the extraordinary.
Pictures frozen in time, every twist having a turn,
each hillock of heather with scent sublime,
like elusive thoughts during sleep.
Those coldest pine for Haworth’s beloved heath.

Snowdrops and Secrets               

Waxen woodland strata,

born before the typical time,

anxious blossoms can’t wait for the melt,

thriving beneath a February cover,

waking early from a lovers’ sleep.

Wintery secrets rise up when snows thaw,

emerging like corpses buried shallow.

About the Author

Patricia Williams
I write poems on a variety of topics and have recently had several of them published. I earned my PhD from Leeds University, England, in Textile Design Studies. My Bachelor and Master degrees were earned in art and design at the University of Wisconsin – Stevens Point, USA. I retired from the University of Wisconsin as a Professor Emerita after 27 years of teaching culture and design and live with my husband in the Wisconsin countryside.