The Ghost Of Sigmund Freud Poem by Sheena Blackhall

It was Saturday, under the sign of Libra
When he crossed, with the aid of morphine,
(that child of Morpheus, Greek God of Dreams)
Into the world of the dead

He bore his grandfather's Hebrew name of Shlomo.
At seven, his father presented him with a Bible
His books were later burned by the Nazis

'What progress we are making, ' he told a friend.
'They would have burned me in the Middle Ages;
Nowadays they're content with burning all my books.'

Interrogated by the feared Gestapo
He escaped to England and safety
Four younger sisters perished in the death camps.

In London, his Chinese chow, Jofi,
Frequently stayed while he conducted sessions.

The ghost of Freud's there still
Amongst his Biedermeier furniture.
Look! It circles the psychoanalytic couch,
On which his patients lay.

The couch is covered with a rich Iranian rug
Chenille cushions piled at the top.
Fine oriental rugs, Heriz and Tabriz, cover the floor and tables.

He continues to live many other surrogate lives
In the writings of Henry James and Virginia Woolf,
Alfred Hitchcock and David Lynch,
He peers out from the art of the Surrealists
The subliminal power of advertisements.

You may catch a glimpse of him studying you
From the eyes of the Hydra, the Baboon of Thoth,
From behind a Bodhisattva, a statue of Artemis,
From the tail of mummified falcon in his museum
His fingers brush vignettes in the book of the dead
Lightly linger on Sphinx amulets, netsuke, a heart scarab

Frequently his ghostly presence flits in the garden,
Sniffing a red geranium in a terracotta flower pot

It glides amongst roses, clematis, plum and almond trees
In this transplanted piece of Hapsburg Vienna