Two Times Haunted

by Brett Rutherford

freely adapted from an Anglo-Saxon poem, “Scael se gaest cuman”

Two times, and two times only,
the soul returns to the body.

Your ghost shall come,
groaning and grievous,
when seven nights have passed.

If your mischance it is
to be the unburied dead,
it shall sit upon your breast

as though at feast
with raven, hawk and vulture.

It shall not deter them, tears
not of water made, cries
not of mortal mouth sounded,
hand ineffectual to beat
the carrion carnival away.

Or if you be in earth, fresh loam
upon the well-wept grave,
round it shall walk three times,
and on the slightest wind
its keening is imperceptible
to all but the smiling worms
as they begin the long business.

Add to your death night
three hundred years.

From where and when the souls
go about their grim reckoning,
it shall come to you again,
searching you out among ruins
and toppled stones, burned-out
buildings and places whose names
have become unpronounceable.

Still, none but witch or wizard

would be the wiser of its coming.

Frail and shrill, a dusty cobweb
of what you once were,

trailing its brittle fingers
amid the dust of the boneyard,
marking your skull among a heap
of your contemporaries, cast
into an ossuary pit, or
down to dust among forgotten urns.

Then shall its sad voice accuse you:
“Gory dust! why did you torture me
with the foulness of earth,
the agonized rot to clay returning?

“In all your idle days, did you think
to lay up a treasure for me? You lived,
you slept, you made love obliviously,
you lied and grew rich, averted your eye
from art or music or human charity.

“Why have I nothing to lay
at the feet of the cosmos
that has your name upon it?
Why for three hundred years
did you torture me,
you, the mere food of worms!”