Board Games

Our ouija board brings out the dead.

Their shadows flicker on the wall.

Tall candles kiss each grizzled head

Alert and waiting for the call.

Impossible to name them all:

Garbo, the Empress of the Sun,

Vinegar Joe, Napoleon,

Bill Shakespeare, natch. Our singing Swan

Of Avon meditates a sonnet.

The electric charges may have gone

But look! I’d wager money on it,

There’s something hums beneath the bonnet.

See—letter after magic letter,

As good as when he lived, or better!

King Oliver, the Queen of Hearts,

The Barons and the Baronesses,

The lad o’ love, the lad o’ parts,

Eager to chart their late successes,

The girlie gangs, the boys in dresses,

The psychopaths, the suicidal,

The beavers and the sheer bone-idle.

Good Doctor Grace, with beardy chin

And dirty neck, Bad Doctor Death

Who did so many patients in—

He cashed their cheques then stopped their breath—

MacHeath, McGonagall, Macbeth,

The Thieves, the Poets and the Kings,

We feel the flutter of their wings.

The mermaids and the sirens sitting,

Their tails curved prettily beneath,

Atropos and her sisters knitting,

The harpies with their sharky teeth,

Bald Caesar in his laurel wreath,

The boy who stole the funeral,

Impossible to name them all.

The dead inhabit every room,

Their dead hearts beating boom-a-boom,

Like shadows in the shuttering gloom,

Like babies strangled in the womb,

Like mummies rising from the tomb,

Like fishes in a catacomb,

Like whispers in an empty room,

They stretch out to the crack of doom,

The crack of doom, the crack of doom.

John Whitworth