Simon MacCulloch

Ghosts

Ghosts are like dust, they explode in the sun,
Energised ash in its life-burning spark;
Ghosts glimmer yet in the webs that are spun
Wide by the galaxies splayed in the dark;
Ghosts warm the air in the plume of your breath,
Icing your path with their glitter of frost,
Sprinkling the world with a sugaring of death,
Pricking the eye with the glints of the lost.

No more themselves than the flakes of your skin
Shed without thought to make way for the new;
Swirled in their orbits they hover and spin,
Sparkle a little then vanish from view.
Thus is the universe, scattered afar,
Bright spectral shreds still aglow from their freeing;
Powder of dermis or prickle of star:
Ghosts of the blast that alone was our being.

Simon MacCulloch lives in London and contributes poetry to a variety of print and online journals, including Spectral Realms, Black Petals, The Horror Zine, Reach Poetry and others.