The Secret Orchard

The ghosts of a house live in the upstairs hall.
    You hear them on their midnight rounds
    laughing like the bells of history; by day
they hang like coats along the wall.

In the dark do they stand tall with upright names
    as haughty as acolytes lighting an altar?
    Surely a few are bent over by worry
like owls, or the Hunchback of Notre Dame.

In April, when the foreign wind relents
    and their preposterous imagination starts
    a crusade for free love and an end to suffering,
do they beg their loss be recompensed?

That's when I go to the secret orchard. The dew
    is fresh on the grass, and a white-throat sings.
    There the haunted world is a Faerie ring,
and the earth at sunrise, a magic view.

Copyright © 2003 F. D. Reeve All rights reserved
from Connecticut Review
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission