Salem Pilgrimage

by Breda Wall Ryan

The dead shiver and fall,
drift against clapboard houses,
innocent as flames.

In the bars, early revellers
order spirit cocktails
or chug Sam Adams Ale.

There’s a show of hands
for free entertainment:
folk rock or jazz in the park

where hyped-up schoolchildren
disguised as one-night witches
divvy their candy swag.

I have crossed a threshold
where the words of the voiceless
are cut off  by a granite wall,

into a horseshoe
of floating tombstones
to remember hanged

Bridget Bishop
whose given name I share,
hear a witchlet declare

old Giles Corey
pressed to death is ‘way cool!’
I shut my ears against a riot

of Halloween celebration,
seek quiet where the dead
stir among black locust trees

and know we should have come
in a February blizzard,
not on this Samhain eve.