Revisionist Poetry – “The House Remembers Halloween” – Inherited Halloweens, v.3

Every year the attic gives back
its inheritance of masks and skeletons,
its cracked lanterns, its grinning dead,
packed away like captured weather.

You can still feel them breathing
under the dust and folded paper:
those papier-mâché phantoms,
those goblins with their painted shock,
those jack-o’-lantern faces
frozen in the act of becoming night.

They once stood at the edge of the street
under orange bulbs and moonlight,
guarding bowls of candy,
making children leap, then laugh,
teaching the dark its oldest trick:
to frighten, then to charm.

Now they sleep in storage boxes,
but not without memory.
A skull keeps its smile.
A witch keeps her crook of shadow.
A ghost remains a white shape
waiting for the door to open.

And when we carry them out again,
we do not simply decorate —
we summon an old fellowship
between dread and delight,
between the shiver and the grin,
between what is feared
and what is loved for being feared.