The Case for Ghosts & other poems

By BeeLyn Naihiwet

The Case for Ghosts

The survivor defeated shame

and lived to tell.

The listeners feared scandal

and denied it.

It takes a village

to bury a crime.

Go Gently, Do Return

Go to the depth of your grief

and stay only as long

as you can.

Be gentle with yourself:

There’s a hole in the heart

of a heart in a hole.

Make a ladder out of your faith,

a lamp out of past losses,

and a comeback

out of the climb.

Reclaim Your Yes

When their approval no longer matters,

you'll find that the only permission

you ever needed was your own.

Step out of smallness.

Speak with authority.

Take up space.

They will adjust.

Tree of Truth

Your new eyes reveal everything

you worked so hard to hide

from yourself.

Breathe.

Sometimes you have to

hit rock bottom

to grow roots.

BeeLyn Naihiwet is an Ethiopian-American poet who was born in Ethiopia and immigrated with her family to the US at the age of ten. She has been getting caught (and un-caught) between these two different cultures ever since. She fell in love with poetry upon discovering Rumi in a Medieval Literature class in college. BeeLyn is a mental health therapist by training and a poet by instinct, which stirs the witness in her.