It’s Samhain. The line between the spirit
world and our own is a ray of moonlight.  
It’s the night when the reluctant soul sticks
to our plane, hovering - a withered rose
whose beauty is the figment of a dream;
a gleam gilding the surface of the lake.

For long hours of idyll would the Lake
poets revel in letting their spirit
soar free on the nightingale’s wings, and dream  
of glimpsing their Muse clad in pure moonlight –
but tonight magic’s afoot: clouds just rose
to blur the moon like fumes from incense sticks.

The Romantics’ habit of rambling sticks
to mind tonight, as I stroll to the lake
and sit down to recall the violent rows
we’d have every night, before her spirit
gave itself over to the bland moonlight
and chose to rest and die, not live and dream.

But perhaps ‘tis I that’s strayed in a dream?
For in that small nest, fashioned out of sticks,
I see her visage, painted in moonlight.
I glimpse a lady traversing the lake –
can it truly be her vagrant spirit,
come to me to grant me a kiss, a rose?

Yes, it must be her – but the crimson rose
her cheek used to be (ere her final dream)
is now lily-white. Her ashen spirit
was scorched too soon on the merciless sticks
of fever in her soul. She chills the lake
as she glides – a mirage of cool moonlight.

I wade in to touch her as the moonlight
takes on her flimsy frame – how frail a rose
she was, still is! Ripples dimple the lake
as our tears drop and bathe with bliss this dream.
What becalming peace I feel as she sticks
to me – we both know: we’re one in spirit.

But the rose wilts too fast in the moonlight.
How to immortalise this spirit, this dream?
How I wish that this lake were the Styx...