…they seem misplaced here

There are ghosts in the field tonight
I cannot see them, but I know they are there
moving between the long grass, where the moonlight lies broken
carrying their old sorrows like lanterns, without flames
the wind knows them and whispers their names
and it rattles the skeletal branches above me
the night sky is endless, black, beautiful and merciless
the stars stare down, with cold indifference
and beneath them, almost hidden in the shadows
the yellow dandelions bloom, they seem misplaced here
fragments of summer, beneath an autumnal sky
and I walk among them carefully
as though crossing a sacred cemetery
where every flower, marks something lost
good at keeping secrets, the dandelions say nothing
they carry the unbearable weight, of things that cannot be spoken
and you have become one of the ghosts
that visit after midnight, neither alive, nor entirely gone
existing instead, in that strange dimension
between memory and forgetting
the flowers tremble in the night winds
their yellow petals, impossibly bright now
time and distance become nothing
and there you are again, your eyes holding oceans
like something that can disappear
and still illuminate the darkness that it left behind
the thought unsettles me, because perhaps
that is what you are now, not love, not anymore
but some distant star
whose light continues traveling towards me
long after its source has vanished
©Ann Bagnall