Ghost Reel

This is maybe a slightly less boring post than the one from earlier. Maybe. You be the judge.

While talking to Michael today about Halloween and the shortening of days, I remembered a poem that I once started to write. I'd jotted a few lines down after a class discussion I'd led in teaching Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts to my 12th graders. In giving them some cultural background to prepare them for the story, one student quietly wondered what happened to the souls of the baby girls who never survived infancy, either killed or left to die of exposure as so many were in not-too-long-ago China. I didn't have much of an answer for him, in part because this was the same kid who once asked me if I thought hurricane Katrina was God's way of punishing all the gay people living in New Orleans, but that's another story.

Anyway, the notion stuck in my head, and since it came up in conversation today, I wrote a few more lines and since I had nothing more pressing I felt like doing, sketched an illustration to go with it. The result:


In case you can't read it, it goes (with a little editing, like ya do):

The law of the land said to leave them behind,
all the girl-babies, where no one would find
No one except for one all in white -
With her, their souls would find endless delight

A beautiful vision, with flowing moonlight hair
that swirled and curled and danced on the air,
She called to their spirits and drummed on her gong
to teach them the steps so they could dance along

What you'd see when her hair was lifted by the breeze,
A visage in bone, a sight to make your blood freeze.
Around her they dance, dressed all in red
The souls of the girls who don't know that they're dead.

Is she a monster who robs them of rest,
Or is she a mother who gives them the best?
To be sure, you and I would find her a fright,
But we're not tiny
and dead
and alone in the night.
***

Author's note: Incidentally, after reading all of this Green Lantern, I find this oddly similar to the character Karu-sil, with her long hair and scary face, but you know what they say about there being no truly original ideas...