Alba and The Old Woman
Alba scoffed at the notion of ghosts, thought them a trick of the neurons, a drift of the light, or a dream.
But the old woman’s persistence brought her up short — that and the state of her:
ragged skirts, a gauze of grime all about her: a clutch of fraying papers in her thin mottled hands.
And her keening voice, a voice that would wake the dead: demos, cratos, demos, cratos — her chant was relentless, a litany laden with the torment and twisting of ages.
Alba felt the chill rippling all down along her neck, felt the shiver, the hairs rise.
What did the old crone want, this tottering bundle of old clothes
and lament, her visits more frequent, her cries growing louder?
Now she seemed to be morphing into some sort of demented clown, juggling letters of a wooden alphabet;
up she’d pop, just when Alba’d settled into The Telegram, or sat drowsing over the late-night news.
She was shifty, full of stratagems: this week it was placards, cobbled together out of old campaign posters,
tilted aloft in those scrawny old arms. What is a library? read one, edged with a chain of interlinked hands.
What is a school? read another; Who knows best? Can you spell despot? She had Alba moithered.
And now the ghost was bringing her cronies along; Alba caught glimpses of Armine Gosling, Cleisthenes, and Nellie Mcclung.
The Toms: Douglas and Paine, Pankhurst and Parnell, Mandela, Havel. What a din.
One stormy evening the wraith waltzed with Ray Guy round her room — the pair moaning and cackling like demons in agony.
Alba’s resigned now: the old dame will have her say. Next time she shows up
Alba’ll be ready to set off at her side — with questions, wry hope; with a sharp pen, a history book;
with counterpoints and suggestions; with commitment and queries; and her best protest shoes.