All Hallows Eve

This year on Hallows Eve
I shall eagerly await that moment
Of Equinoctial balance
When the gate to Hades Hallowed Halls
Briefly opens to allow
All Holy souls once again
To walk this too too sordid world.
On Midnight's hour
My dark accustomed eyes
Will scan the window to the world of shades
Watching eagerly to see
Who walks abroad this only night.
Is that my mother
Walking without aid
And arm in arm with some young man;
Why it is my father,
Still fifty years her junior
Since age has not withered him.
There is my sister
Smiling now,
Her sorrows and her fears all dispersed
Into death's gentle embrace,
Her beauty restored,
Her life in death
Outshining her long death in life.
There, sitting on the garden bench,
My grandfather, the good one who loved us all
And gave me sixpences.
The other must be that dark shadow
Hiding in the trees
Still afraid to come to his son's death,
Still looking for the funeral he never saw,
Still too proud, or is he now
Too ashamed,
To walk beside the woman his son chose?
Oh look, so many shades there are
That I would wish to see again.
Look at them all,
Such a little few I know,
Some old friends - Brian
And poor withered Brian -
But this night he walks
Unwheeled and kisses girls
Without the fear of recoil.
There is Val still arguing with the bosses,
And my wife's mother
Still singing all the songs so well
Arm in arm with an undisfigured husband;
Unblinded and unembittered
Freely laughing at the nascent moon.
The hour has come and gone and now they go.
Oh! so very many,
It seems an endless line that fades into the night
And mists the sky like
Moon illuminated wisps.
The dead of wars,
The old men worn down by work
The women scarred by births
The children with no adult shade;
A long line of suffering humanity
Taking this brief view
Of their greatest achievement.
Listen to their cry;
Something there is
That they wish us to know
And all of us to do.