Some Ghosts & Some Ghouls
Some Ghosts & Some Ghouls
Original Text
Jay Macpherson, Poems Twice Told: The Boatman & Welcoming Disaster (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1981): 71.
1While we loved those who never read our poems,
2Answered our letters, said the simple things we
3Waited so long for, and were too polite to
4 See we were crying,
5Irony fed us: for the days we watched our
6Chances to please them, nights in rumpled beds lay
7Gored by their phantoms, guilty most of suffering,
8 We were rewarded.
9While we admired how ignorance became them,
10Coldness adorned, they came at length to trust us,
11Made us their mirrors: last their hopeless loves to
12 Us they confided.
13They were our teachers: what we are, they made us.
14Cautious our converse, prudent our behaviour,
15Guarded our faces: we behind them lurking,
16 Greedy, devourers.
Publication Start Year
1974
Publication Notes
Welcoming Disaster (Toronto: Saannes, 1974).
RPO poem Editors
Ian Lancashire
RPO Edition
2009
Form
Special Copyright
"Some Ghosts & Some Ghouls" © Jay Macpherson. Printed gratis, and specifically for Representative Poetry Online, with permission of the author. As published in Poems Twice Told (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1981). Any other use, including reproduction for any purposes, educational or otherwise, will require explicit written permission from Jay Macpherson.