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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dara Wier
Dara Wier
Born in 1949, poet Dara Weir is the author of numerous collections of poetry...
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FURTHER READING
Ghost Poems
Hamlet, Act I, Scene I [Some say that ever 'gainst that season comes]
by William Shakespeare
A Ghost
by Cole Swensen
All Hallows Night
by Lizette Woodworth Reese
Blue Dementia
by Yusef Komunyakaa
Blue Oxen
by Dara Wier
Epitaph
by Eric Pankey
Ghost
by Paul Mariani
Ghost Elephants
by Jean Valentine
Ghost House
by Robert Frost
Ghost in the Land of Skeletons
by Christopher Kennedy
Ghost Notes [excerpt]
by Ralph Burns
Ghostology
by Rebecca Lindenberg
Ghosts That Need Reminding
by Dana Levin
Hallow-E'en, 1915
by Winifred M. Letts
Haunted Houses
by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Haunted Seas
by Cale Young Rice
How Can It Be I Am No Longer I
by Lucie Brock-Broido
Lamp or Mirror
by Tony Barnstone
Lenore
by Edgar Allan Poe
Letter from a Haunted Room
by Lisa Sewell
Low Barometer
by Robert Bridges
My hero bares his nerves
by Dylan Thomas
Ode to a Dressmaker's Dummy
by Donald Justice
Patsy Sees a Ghost
by Lola Haskins
Poems About Ghosts
Rain
by Claribel Alegría
Red String
by Minnie Bruce Pratt
Restless Ghost
by Eric Pankey
Sequestered Writing
by Carolyn Forché
Shadwell Stair
by Wilfred Owen
Shaking the Grass
by Janice N. Harrington
Something Whispered in the Shakuhachi
by Garrett Hongo
Song for the Clatter-Bones
by F. R. Higgins, read by James Wright
Spirit Birds
by Stanley Plumly
The Apparition
by John Donne
The Ghost Has No Home
by Jeff Clark
The Haunted Palace
by Edgar Allan Poe
To the Trespasser
by David Barber
Unbidden
by Rae Armantrout
What They Found In the Diving Bell
by Traci Brimhall
Whose Story of Us We Is Told Is Us
by Shane McCrae
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We're All Ghosts Now

 
by Dara Wier

So says my friend who doesn’t know it now
But he’s been conscripted to say what I shouldn’t

Want anyone to say too soon, too suddenly, too many times
More than must be said. It’s a tall order, or as another friend says

A tall drink of water, otherwise: it’s plain & simple:
What anyone wants most of all.

Another friend tells me I’m easy and means something sweetly as when
One caves with the slightest shudder somehow thoroughly.

Another says what you say should be in a poem which means
Someone is taking for me the trouble to breathe, maybe fire.

Lucidity, quick and painlessly employed, kind of, as a kind nurse employs
Her rough pinch to be less strict than her needle’s as it settles into a vein

To take sufficient blood away somewhere to be deployed in centrifuge
To diagnose and otherwise and likewise and counterclockwise say, the way

Metaphor or blood can have the last word. In order to be sure of what the
Center is, everything has to spin away, I guess. Your words like a lost ghost

On a mission. I've never met a ghost who's not on a mission.
Why otherwise bother to be a ghost's ghost?

When we write to ghosts we write on stony water. One can skip a stone
In order to pretend to find ten thousands things.

Nearby is very close.
Nearby I take your words to water. My ghosts are growing restless.
About this poem:

"I like ghosts. I like friends. I like couplets. I like the idea of a mission."

—Dara Wier






Copyright © 2013 by Dara Wier. Used with permission of the author. This poem appeared in Poem-A-Day on June 10, 2013. Browse the Poem-A-Day archive.
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