Lucian

Lucian

was a gentle ghost

who sometimes forgot

that he had died. He wandered Central Park,

that green heart of Manhattan.

A few could feel him there—the painters, the dreamers—

though they could never quite answer back,

and so his loneliness learned to listen for light.

Lucian carried armfuls of stories,

for he had been writing a children’s tale when he left the world.

So he hurried after one child, then another,

offering adventures like bright kites, and for a little while they laughed with him.

Now and then, a day opened like a window, and he made a friend.

Adults could not hear him, and often led their children away, but wonder, once awakened, was not so easily sent home.

Louis was another such boy,

lost in a car accident,

who woke believing

he had only risen out of a hard dream until memory returned

with morning’s light, and yet each dawn grew a little kinder.

When Lucian found Louis, they ran through Central Park as if the wind had claimed them for its own.

The squirrels stared as though the world had briefly sung out of tune,

then blamed it on the breeze—for even doubters sometimes bow to mystery.

There were others, too.

Many drifted through Grand Central Station,

lonely souls still hoping for a conversation,

but most people could neither see nor hear them.

Strangers passed through them

as if they were made only of weather,

sometimes a hundred times in a single hour.

Even so, memory did not only wound them; it kept their names alight.

The sensitive ones still felt them—the poet mid-line, the actor in a pause, the artist turning toward a shimmer they could not explain.

They were rare, but not so rare that hope forgot them.

And when the skies darkened,

the ghosts would gather close in the tunnels,

not only from fear, but to keep one another warm,

wondering whether the hand above them

might still be on its way,

to lead them toward whatever meadow waits beyond,

whatever bright country that may be.

And if they were meant to linger here a little longer,

they would learn, together, how even this in-between world can hold a little dawn.