I left my sister sleeping and went down to rebuke the ghosts.
My terror was familiar, a lightning storm of the heart.
From the stairs I felt their vibrations, unvoiced pleas
like zombies — shuffling famine, stench of yearning.
I spoke harsh words. They fled. Never far, but far enough.
On my way to the outdoor kitchen, I shook, too.
In the new void, I coaxed flame from paper and twigs,
filled a lidless pot from the cistern, listened for whispers.
We had plenty of charcoal — trees felled and slow-burned
all down the peninsula. Persistent lives scorched to stillness.
We were ravenous all the time. Ate roots and barks,
foods that were not food. Fear was all we had to share.
Only later did I wonder: Were you lonely
in that shattered house? Confused
when we hid from you each night,
our bodies leaking slow warmth
into the floor, which was also your ceiling?
Are we all ghosts-to-be?
It was your home, too,
I see that now — the undead
amongst the unkilled.
Y. S. Lee’s poems have won CV2’s Foster Prize and appeared in Best Canadian Poetry 2025. Brick Books will publish her first collection, Rebuke the Ghosts, in 2027.
Questions and Answers
What inspired or motivated you to write this poem?
When she was young, my grandmother survived the Japanese occupation of Malaya. She never spoke of it in my hearing but after she died, my grandfather shared a brief sketch from her teenaged years. I had so many questions and no way to find answers. Eventually, that sketch became the first line of this poem, in which I try to imagine what she might have thought and felt at the time. I’m sure I got things wrong, but perhaps I’ve bumped up against something genuine, nonetheless.
What poetic techniques did you use in this poem? How much attention do you pay to form and metre?
Sachiko Murakami says that when we write free verse, we need to create our own form. Because this is a poem about invasion, I set up the first six stanzas as tight, end-stopped couplets that enact the speaker’s desire for boundaries and safety. The speaker here is too frightened to let thoughts flow freely from one stanza to the next; she clings to fiercely guarded borders. When the poem leaps in time in stanza seven, the speaker has survived. She now has energy to wonder, and so the final stanzas open up to allow for more breath, questions, imagination.