One sunny May, I ran to play,
When I was twelve years old,
Upon the hill. I miss her still—
A girl with curls of gold
In ribbon ties, big sky-blue eyes,
And waving, dark-red dress
Soon ran my way and asked to play—
How could I not say yes?

“I’m Beth,” she said. “My mother’s dead;
I’m hiding from her ghost.”
I thought, “A shame, her gruesome game,”
But soon I was engrossed.
We laughed and played along the grade,
Cavorted up the hill,
And soon rolled down, clothes turning brown,
Collapsed, and then lay still.

Then Beth and I stared toward the sky,
Then wrestled, then caressed,
And very soon that afternoon,
Our love began the rest.
We hoped our playing would one day
Give rise to married bliss.
I gazed into her pools of blue;
We leaned in for the kiss.

A woman’s ghost gave off the most
Horrendous, ghastly chill.
We stood upright in cold and fright;
Her ghost-hand reaped the kill.
I saw Beth die. Her ghost stood high
And quickly shed its shell.
Her ribbons fastened to the grass
As down her body fell.

Both, hand in hand, flew off the land.
Beth’s ghost was forced to go
Away from me like Annabel Lee,
But where, I’ll never know.
Then Beth up high bid me goodbye;
She waved as she looked back.
The two ghosts flew into the blue,
And everything went black.

I felt Mom shake me wide awake;
She’d found me on the hill.
“Are you all right?” She yelled in fright.
I sat up feeling ill.
I told her of my one-day love
And how she met her death.
My mother deemed it all a dream
And said there was no Beth.

So I believed I’d been deceived
And never met the lass,
Until I found, upon the ground,
Her ribbon coiled on grass.
The ghost who took her didn’t look
And left it unawares.
I picked the band up in my hand
And three blonde, curly hairs.

“Ghost Girl” was first published by The Society of Classical Poets.

Joshua C. Frank works in the field of statistics and lives in the American Heartland.  His poetry has been published in The Society of Classical Poets, Snakeskin, The Lyric, Sparks of Calliope, Westward Quarterly, New English Review, Atop the Cliffs, Our Day’s Encounter, The Creativity Webzine, Asses of Parnassus, Lothlorien Poetry Journal, All Your Poems, Verse Virtual, The Asahi Haikuist Network, LEAF Journal, and the anthology Whose Spirits Touch, and his short fiction has been published in New English Review, The Creativity Webzine, and Nanoism.