With Halloween nearly upon us, this week’s poem, Kathleen Sullivan’s “Be Afraid,” considers a particular kind of scariness. I love how this poem takes the eerily tangible trappings of our spookiest tropes, trains them on the most human of fears, and finally turns that fear around to find triumph.

Sullivan has an MFA from Stonecoast, started writing in her 60s and has had a private psychotherapy practice for almost half a century. She is co-editor of the Littoral Books anthology “A Dangerous New World: Maine Voices on the Climate Crisis.”

Poets, please note that submissions to Deep Water are now open. Deep Water is especially eager to share poems by Black writers, writers of color, indigenous writers and other underrepresented voices. There is a link to submit in the credits below.

 

Be Afraid

By Kathleen Sullivan

 

Old ladies once scared me—

powdery souls, half material body, half ghost,

faded, crinkled, like old bedsheets.

 

Invisible lives lived in half-step measure,

shuffled into insignificance

by the cool hand of time.

 

Myself grown so suddenly into an old lady,

a smudge of red now below my thin lip line,

“be afraid,” I say to you. “Be very afraid.”

 

For beneath our crumpled skin, unruffled

finally by fashion or favor, we are all bone

and teeth, nothing to prove, nothing to lose.

 

Like elms in winter, stripped

of leafy prettiness, we stand in our rootedness,

bearing witness to all we have seen and lost,

 

free to speak what we know

into the cushioned rooms, heedless of mirrors

or curses or scorn.

 

Megan Grumbling is a poet and writer who lives in Portland. Deep Water: Maine Poems is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. “Be Afriad,” copyright © 2020 by Kathleen Sullivan, appears by permission of the author. Submissions to Deep Water are open now and through the end of November. For more information, go to mainewriters.org/deep-water.

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