Each night I crawl under the sheets
curled against the woman I love
and beside me slips your ghost.
For sixty years you were no more
than a fleeting dream faceless, nameless,
an infrequent visitor to my gallery
of hopes, desires, and wishes.
You never had a face, did I
have one you could remember before
I was plucked from you too soon, you
lurking in the shadows of my heart.
Was I ever a child to you, in that moment
I emerged from you, or did you look away,
not wanting, not daring to see a face that
still alive might haunt you through life.
Was I real in your world, in the world
into which I could never go, the world
in which no one could know I existed.
Perhaps it is fitting, mother, that you
haunt my dreams now, an apparition
locked in time by the photo I have two
of you in your bloom into womanhood,
for I was a silent ghost for five decades.
But now we are reunited and in my sleep
you are again alive, and I now have
the woman who brought me into
the world and fled back into her own.

First published in Flora Fiction, A Literary Magazine, Vol. 5, Issue 2
https://florafiction.com/literary-magazine/