I Heard Her Call His Name

I Heard Her Call His Name

He’d partied with friends and had gone home alone,

A quiet end to his evening, no wild oats sown,

He had been sleeping when a woman entered his room,

He glanced up and saw her after he detected her perfume,

She was beautiful and seemed to float with angelic grace,

But when she turned, there was something about her face,

Instead of a smile he saw loneliness and despair,

“I’m having a nightmare,” he mused, “due to the cool air”,

He shivered and pulled the covers up real tight,

Determined he could simply dismiss his fright,

But closer she came and sat quickly on his bed,

“It is only a dream,” he thought, still filled with dread,

He slipped deeper into the covers, perhaps she would not stay,

But her weight pressed upon him, taking his breath away,

He thought he heard her whisper, “You are mine today,”

A few minutes, an hour or more, time seemed to delay,

Her weight shifted, he felt her leaving again,

Was she gone, really gone, or was the departure feigned?

Although still afraid, he had to know, whether dream or for real,

The covers he pulled down and looked, she waited for him still,

She hovered there in the dark, yet he could see her smile,

And then through the wall she stepped, humming all the while,

“Thank you, sir!” she called out, “You’re the father of my child!”

He did not move till dawn it broke, he could scarcely even breathe,

“Was there someone who would listen now, and perhaps even believe?”

I listened to his story, I asked him to tell me twice,

Each time he paled as he began, his blood cold as ice,

He was reluctant to sleep again, except in light of day,

He claimed she was waiting, wanting to have her way,

Daily he grew weaker, he had lost his taste for food,

But one day he said to me, “I’m in a party mood,”

“Bring me brown ale and we’ll celebrate,

It’s time to meet my fate,”

With a smile he said, “She waited for me so long,

Now it’s time for me to go where I belong,”

With those words said, he gasped his last breath,

And on his face his last smile, frozen there in death,

His story would have ended there but the coroner called to me,

“What do you know about his children? This photo shows three,”

Three children were there, hovering in air, that’s how it seemed to me,

He sat proudly with his arm around---nothing that I could see,

On the back he wrote a note, “This is my family,

My wife is a ghost, she returns whenever she can,

Now I must go where I belong, I’m a family man.”

This story may sound odd, but it’s true all the same,

I was there when he died, “I heard her call his name.”