Trauma

The grave yard is peaceful in the Autumn sun.
The grass is freshly cut and still green,
not yet browned by frost.
On the trees, the leaves are still bright with color,
their vibrancy belying their death.
The gravestones almost glow white in the afternoon sun.
It is a place of peace.

And yet the ghosts live.
Most of them benign, even friendly,
but a few, the most secretive and malignant lurk,
mostly invisible, hidden from view,
believed long dead by the innocent, by you perhaps,
a predator, a remnant of another time,
still virulent and hungry, long after the body is dead,
the bloody teeth live.

About this poem

“Poets”, I remember one lady telling me when I was young, “write of trees and flowers and other pretty things.” Sometimes perhaps, not always.

Trauma is a beast. And most of us don’t understand it at all. It rises from the grave we thought we had buried it in, time and time again,

Tom