In the Mind, Travelling

 In the Mind, Travelling

In the mind, travelling 

over a stretch of wild water –

among the wildest in the world –

I encounter the ghost of one

I thought long dead.

I buried her myself, years ago.

She was become as an old song

few remembered, so I told

myself, who also rarely

recalled that face, that voice,

let alone thoughts or utterances. 

Yet here she is, as if reborn.

It’s only that I began thinking 

of that island whose daughter

I was, and the time living there ... 

that complicated girl 

I meant to leave behind. 

It seems I've re-created the Strait.

Easier to cross mentally

than in a real boat.Though once

(when I banished her back there)

this way of making the crossing 

would have been the more turbulent.

What made me idly try it now?

Well, no matter. It is nearly

Samhain, here in the Southern 

half of the Sphere. Ghosts

and spirits of all kinds 

may be starting to peer through

or reach through the thinning divide.

Why should a disembodied

fragment that once formed part

of a living entity not seek,

perhaps by its own thoughts,

to rejoin the parent body?

I contemplate a welcome.

Image of Bass Strait (between Tasmania and the Australian mainland) taken from Sorrento, Victoria, by Finn Whelan; found on Unsplash.

Written in response to prompt 25 for April 2021, at Poetic Asides, to write a poem about thought.

Sharing with Poets and Storytellers United for Weekly Scribblings #67: Liminal Space. More than one kind of that here!

(A friend who read this found it unclear, so I have now tweaked it in  the hope of being less obscure.)