Mother, I lost you too soon.
There wasn’t time for goodbyes.
Now I’ve called in a medium.
She’s holding this séance for you.
We set a table and two chairs
high up in our dusty attic.
She gently calls out your name,
and then we patiently wait.
The table slightly quivers,
and the floorboards groan and creak.
Several long minutes come and go.
A spirit is making itself known.
The medium is loudly wailing.
Our windows are steaming up.
The lady is wholly possessed,
but her voice is not my mother’s.
Instead it’s like a banshee cry,
a being I never heard before.
I had hope this presence was you,
but now, something else has come through.
Gary Davis enjoys exercising his imagination through crafting dark and darkly-humorous haiku and other forms of poetry. In a given poem, he likes to combine narrative, emotion, and image in an unsettling tapestry with hopefully a twist at the end. Mr. Davis has published poetry in Tales from the Moonlit Path, Scifaikuest, Star*Line, Tales of the Talisman, Bloodbond, Illumen, Spaceports & Spidersilk, It Came from Her Purse, Potter’s Field, The Hungur Chronicles, and a sci-fi anthology, Kepler’s Cowboys (2014-2024).
Published 5/12/24