Ghosts On the Hudson
A lark, to go to the summit
At night, see the valley
Land of Ichabod Crane.
We are nine of us, what
Could be the harm or fear?
Starless night, cold in
These mountains;
Although it’s August.
The children are carried as backpacks
We will go to see “the haunts”.
Laughing on the trail,
Confident – no moon.
Stars seem shrouded and
The valley is filmed in shreds of fog.
We joke and sing as we ascend.
At the summit we are lords
Of all that we survey.
Ethereal night, ribbon
Of silver river.
A sturdy Coleman torch to guide us.
A gust, and the torch fails.
And now the night and sky
Take on a new meaning –
Ghostly, laughing at us….
Mere mortals.
And those Catskill legends
Abound and are boundless.
A match, a lighter – why
Does it take endless time?
A flare—and…
We are just campers again
Upstate, safe, no ghosts.
For now.
The prompt for Big Tent poetry this week is ... write a scary poem. In my current mood, scary is the economy. Thus, I went back in time to dig out the poem I wrote about the scariest natural phenomenon I have lived through... in the spooky Catskills, nearly 3 decades ago. A foul wind blew out our lantern as we were surveying the original "Valley of Sleepy Hollow" from a high promontory in the middle of the night. The wind, I recall, as vividly today as if it were yesterday, was cold, clammy, and smelled distinctly foul. It came from nowhere in the middle of an August camping trip. Scary. We hightailed it, kids and all, back to our campsite as soon as we could get the lantern relit. I wrote this poem in 2003.
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