The dead don’t walk.
All you have heard of that is
Spook-chat and scare-talk.
The dead are dead,
and dead they’ll stay.
The heroes in the greenwood,
the king of once and future time,
Arthur and Coeur de Lyon,
bold Robin Hood:
all gone away.
God’s dead to Mary,
but still in her mind
a serious young man, twenty,
not yet blind.
The dead don’t know.
The names under your fingers,
your own reflected face,
they have let go.
Yeats lost between the gyres,
The King of Cats among the Swiss,
Mickey Mouse and Alger Hiss,
baby say bye-bye.
Father’s lost his Holy Ghost,
Shiva his drummer.
Socrates to Plato:
“Slumber.”
The dead can’t tell.
All you can feel for them is longing
for the sole impelling thing
that keeps them mute.