The Night Is So Long Before The Dead Begin To Speak Poem by Patti Masterman

In daylight hours, I like to read stories
of haunted towns, uninhabited cities.
I stare at the faded photographs, the faces,
trying to memorize each detail.

Then at night, I lie awake in bed
while the whole world permeates sleep,
attempting with intense power of concentration
to bridge whole villages back to life;
imagining their tasks, fears, songs they sang,
day-dreams they indulged.

I have seen traces of their existence
on bruised brick, ruined walls, opened up ceilings.
There are ancient cars, now turning
into an airy Battenberg of chain-mail,
and skeleton keys fit only for a skeleton now.

Sometimes their presence here seems more
like a myth, a blighted stair going nowhere,
up into an endlessly black and annihilating night.

I want to know if they ever actually lived,
and to know it with something near to certainty.
It could be I am looking for assurance only for myself;
or perhaps there is the fear I was just foolish enough
to believe that sleep was only a partition between days,
and that one single night could never out-last lifetimes.