Most poetry-lovers know classic horror poems by writers like Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Dickinson and Percy Bysshe Shelley. But there are also many eerie poems written by poets who aren’t known specifically for their gothic or horror writing. Some of the poems on this list describe hauntings (from both the living and the dead’s perspective).
Others are based on more tangible real-life horrors. And some capture the troubling slipstream feeling that things aren’t as they should be. Grab a cozy blanket, light a crackling fire, and perhaps don’t read these poems alone.
The speaker of “Ghost” by poet and memoirist Cynthia Huntington is a spirit. This ghost describes itself just as many of us imagine (or have seen) apparitions: I was a shape moving rapidly, nervous at the edge of your vision […] I made myself present, though never distinct. This ghost tells the reader, “You must have felt me / watching you,” knowing how their presence would’ve surely alarmed their audience.
In “Ghost,” part of the unease comes from not knowing if the ghost’s motives are good… or evil. Holly Lyn Walrath, “We Have Always Lived” With “We Have Always Lived,” writer, editor, publisher and poet Holly Lyn Walrath creates an erasure/blackout poem from the text of horror icon Shirley Jackson’s book We Have Always Lived in the Castle. This source material is about two isolated sisters with a bleak family history, who are loathed by their neighbors and must contend with the arrival of a mysterious cousin.
Walrath slices down to the terror at the heart of this story by turning some of the words from this novel into a poem, which begins, “they were all dead.” She repeats certain phrases—like “their bodies,” and most frightening, “had always been there”—to create a sense of unease. The poem ends “I must live on,” highlighting the isolation of the sisters from Jackson’s original story: While “they were all dead,” this speaker must continue to live on, alone. With “Day of the Dead,” performer and writer Joy Harjo has written a love poem of sorts.
The poem from her collection In Mad Love and War takes place on Día de Los Muertos, a time to celebrate the lives of loved ones lost and welcome their spirits back. As she says in the opening of this prose poem, “This is a witching season.” Alongside the depictions of this autumnal holiday (“Spirits play crack-the-whip in the abyss”), she also mourns a separation from someone she addresses the poem to: “I have needed to talk but you are insanely absent and I have become insanely mute.” In comparing the transformational aspects of both love and the Day of the Dead, Harjo reminds readers that “love changes molecular structure… The Day of the Dead marks skeletal transition and flowers bloom in the snow.” What is love in an uncertain season but the possibility of flowers blooming in the snow? Scholar, writer and cultural organizer Eve L.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
