One Minute Ghost Story
A while ago, I participated in an afternoon sponsored by X-TRA, the art magazine, at the Hammer Museum, where artists and writers were asked to pick an image, any kind of image, and speak about it for one minute. I picked an image from my fabulous photographer friend Claudia Kunin’s portfolio ‘3D Ghost Stories” called “The Hand of Fate” (guess whose hand it was?) Here’s the image, and this was my minute.
Richard Quincey was a promising young man.
He used to meet Beth Ambercrombie down by the river.
No one knew what went on by moonlight.
Soon after,
He left and wed the daughter of a Boston merchant,
a handsome marriage.
A promising start.
Yet, from then on, nothing went right.
Whatever he tried was doomed to failure.
Lawsuits ran against him.
Children sickened and died.
He bore his failures nobly.
What a shame, people said, about Richard Quincey.
While Beth Ambercrombie walks in her strange garden by moonlight
She never did marry.
By moonlight she peers into the basin
where she studies Richard Quincey,
And again draws the sign in the water.
This entry was posted on 08/26/2014 at 1:00 pm and is filed under Ghost stories, Poems, The Literateria. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
08/26/2014 at 1:46 pm
[…] Check out the rest of the series here. Number 13 features Mama Snail’s hand. She wrote a poem about […]
08/26/2014 at 3:08 pm
Ghost stories are hard to make scary. Well done and thank you!
08/28/2014 at 9:52 am
Appreciate it Maureen. Maybe I’ll try some of the other images.
08/26/2014 at 5:44 pm
Like this one, Janet. Well, I generally like all of them, but especially liked the brevity. So much said in so few words.
08/28/2014 at 9:51 am
Thanks Judy!
08/31/2014 at 12:12 pm
Life story in a few well-chosen words.