By Dion O’Reilly
I am regularly told my poems are too intense, that they vividly present the wound but not the cure, that they lack tenderness. This used to simply hurt me. Now it makes me think.
Initially, I suspected that what’s called intense is sometimes just honest, and what’s called soft or quiet is just safe. But I’ve also had to ask whether the criticism contains something true—whether my poems deflect, not into softness, but into bluntness and brutality, which is its own kind of armor. Maybe I avoid the deeper thing by beating on the surface.
Years ago, I taught art in an elementary school. Invariably, with each new assignment, the little artists would ask, “Can I be done?” But, in most cases, to create a more complete work of art, they still needed a few more brush strokes or scissor cuts. We want to be done. We want to hold our work to the light and see it’s good. Most poets, especially early in their development, are unconsciously looking for that exit—an ironic twist, an image that displaces feeling, the philosophical reframe, the sudden zoom out to landscape, history, cliché, or abstraction. These moves feel like sophistication because they resemble what sophisticated poets do. But in less skilled hands, and sometimes in skilled ones, they are escape hatches.
So let’s take a look at a poem that never seeks an exit, that heightens the emotion as it moves through its stanzas: “Ghost Child,” by Danusha Laméris, a writer who, in every one of her three books, celebrates and eulogizes the mysteries of human feeling and experience, who presents the tragic and the traumatic while remaining tender.
Ghost Child by Danusha Laméris
Sometimes I can almost see him,
skinny legs, a striped shirt,
his black hair tucked under a baseball cap.
He’s running in the backyard
with the other kids—my son—
chasing chickens, throwing a ball
against the fence.
Only he is not my son.
He’s the one I was expecting that season
my belly grew taut as a honeydew,
who would take his first steps, in summer,
on the dry grass behind the house.
Not the one who lay on a pile of pillows,
scanning the ceiling for years
with his big, dark eyes, as we bent
to spoon puréed food into his mouth.
And now, even though he’s dead,
his mirror other lives on—
a phantom outline
always at the edges of my vision.
And because he, too, is my child,
I want to love him,
but I can’t bear to see him
lengthening each season,
oblivious to me—his mother—
and to his brother
scattered in the wind.
The poem opens with pure perception—specific, physical, immediate. Striped shirt, baseball cap, black hair, a boy running and throwing a ball against a fence, the domestic world rendered with complete confidence. We are inside a moment, a backyard, a mother’s vision of ordinary childhood. And then, a stanza break followed by: “Only he is not my son.”
That stanza break is a trapdoor. If that line had been continuous with the stanza above, it would have been a correction. As a stanza opening, after the white space, it is a small devastation. The poem has established a world and then—without irony, without softening—withdrawn it.
What follows is the real son, rendered with the same bodily precision as the ghost child: lying on pillows, ceiling-scanning eyes, pureed food on a spoon. Two boys, both specific, both physically present in the poem, exist in completely different ontological registers. By placing them in parallel stanzas, Laméris makes us feel the relationship between them before she names it. The white space between the stanzas is not only where the poem thinks, but also an emptiness that embodies the loss.
Each stanza break turns the screw a little more, but the next one is the most powerful of all and interests me in the way it does not deflect into brutality, softness, or irony, despite the hot material:
And now, even though he’s dead,
his mirror other lives on—
a phantom outline
always at the edges of my vision.
“Even though he’s dead” is the flattest possible statement of death—jarringly declarative, no image, no metaphor. But the “even though” does something philosophically strange: it treats death as a concession—merely an inconvenience to the larger argument. The syntax says, counterintuitively, that death is not the main point. What comes next is.
This is ontologically precise. The ghost child exists in a category where, because he never fully lived, death doesn’t fully apply. He was always already a phantom. Death itself is quietly redefined, and that is what takes it further than the mere pain of loss.. The movement in these four lines is: blunt fact/exposition → abstract concept → embodied perception. “Even though he’s dead”—declarative, cold. “His mirror other lives on“—abstract, clinical, philosophical, slightly strange, and “mirror other” is not standard English, not cliché. It’s coined for the occasion, arriving with the authority of precision rather than the hollowness of borrowed language. And then immediately: “a phantom outline / always at the edges of my vision”— pure sensation—the embodied experience of almost-seeing.
The abstraction of “mirror other” functions as a decompression chamber between the flat statement of death and the raw sensory image that follows. Without it, the jump would be too naked, too blunt and heavy, exactly the kind of jump a lesser writer might have made. And crucially, the abstraction of “mirror other” is earned—the concrete work has already been done. We have seen both boys in precise physical detail. “Mirror other” doesn’t introduce an idea: it names what we already feel. Without the descriptive preparation, we would have no idea what she was talking about. The poem never dwells in abstraction. It passes through it—a bridge, not a destination.
Most importantly, this stanza, with its line, “always at the edges of my vision,” could have ended the poem, on the brutal point of loss and memory, a place where many poets stop, but for Laméris, that is not enough,
She carries us through another circle of her downward journey, another final twist of the screw—the last stanza, which is almost entirely exposition—where the speaker explains her inner state directly, confessionally, in plain statement.
And because he, too, is my child,
I want to love him,
but I can’t bear to see him
lengthening each season,
oblivious to me—his mother—
and to his brother
scattered in the wind.
For me, this is the most devastating passage in the poem because, by this point, everything has been so thoroughly established that the exposition arrives as revelation rather than explanation. We receive it as truth because we have already lived it as image.
“And because he, too, is my child” is painfully logical, almost legal, trying to be fair to something that resists fairness. “I want to love him”—simple, unsatisfied desire, a subjunctive expression of what never-will-be, powerful and acute, but the next desire is even more gut wrenching: “But I can’t bear”—the burden of the body’s refusal to love. Not won’t, which would be volitional. Can’t—involuntary, beyond her capacity. Each desire builds in thwarted intensity.
And then “lengthening each season” shifts the grammar from the speaker’s interiority to the ghost child’s autonomous existence, his growing independence from her grief, his indifference. This is the cruelest possible severance, rendered in the most ordinary language. Lengthening is what children do, the word a mother uses, the embodied perception of watching a child grow taller year by year., untouchable and distant. The plain language doesn’t blunt the pain. It names it in all its nuance, making it more comprehensible.
The horror here is not softened but, in a precise, emotional rendering, it is domesticated, which is actually more terrible. Softening would reduce it. Domesticating it makes it permanent, livable, something she carries inside ordinary time, every season, not just in moments of acute grief. The ghost child is not a monument to loss. He is a haunt inside the rhythm of the natural world, and she has to witness him in the way grief is carried: constant, almost imperceptible burden sewn into the banal workings of the everyday.
This domestication is also, I think, an act of ethical humility and universality. Laméris refuses to elevate her loss above the common losses of the world. She is not saying her suffering is exceptional. She is showing what loss looks like inside the ordinary—continuous, low-grade, permanent. A shared experience, not despite its specificity but because of it. This is known as “letting the reader in.”
The final stanza’s “Oblivious to me—his mother—” with the appositive arriving inside those dashes like a small cry, is a clarification. Emotionally it is the speaker asserting her own existence to someone who cannot perceive her. The punctuation enacts the isolation without slapping us in the face with it. That dash before “his mother” creates a tiny pause in which she has to identify herself, has to name her own claim on him against his complete indifference. Then “and to his brother / scattered in the wind”—a metaphorical and literal truth that works not only for its accuracy, but for its ancient, elemental, human image of irreversible dispersal. Not tidied up, not prettied up, not some sledgehammer of truth: the ghost child keeps growing, the dead child is wind-scattered. The irresolution is a final act of honesty, and grief embodied in two phantoms.
To further deepen its power, “Ghost Child” exists in the ancient, archetypal realm of human imagination. Laméris draws on ancient knowledge without announcing it. The supernatural is simply present, treated with complete seriousness, and that seriousness is what gives the poem its mythic weight alongside its domestic precision. The ghost is never imagined, never seen as metaphor; it is its own supernatural entity, respected and embraced. It is a real boy growing into a man, aging, and dying in his own dimension. In this materialist world, that alone is a radical act and another reason the poem is appealing. By placing her experience in the archetypal realm, her ego is distanced. The sincerity is palpable.
The intelligence of this poem might be named in many ways—emotional precision, psychological rigor, phenomenological courage. But the simplest and truest phrase I can find is unflinching tenderness. She holds both simultaneously—the absolute refusal to look away and the absolute refusal to harden. The tenderness is what makes the unflinching unbearable. The unflinching is what keeps the tenderness from sentiment.
Not every poem that stays with its deeper meaning will find tenderness. Some will find rage, or grief without consolation, or a chilling truth. But what staying with feeling provides is a recognition of something truer than the initial conceit. It is worth noting that the word stanza comes from the Italian for room. We have been talking all along about staying in the room. The best poems demand exactly that: not the reflexive exit, not the premature release, but the willingness to remain in the rooms of what we truly are.
Dion O’Reilly’s third book, Limerence, was the finalist for The Floating Bridge John Pierce Competition for Washington State Poets. She is the author of Sadness of the Apex Predator (Cornerstone Press 2024) and Ghost Dogs (Terrapin 2020). Her work appears in Rattle, Missouri Review, The Sun, Alaska Quarterly Review, and RHINO. Most recently, her work was chosen as one of the winners of the 17th Annual Narrative Poetry Prize. A podcaster at The Hive Poetry Collective, private workshop facilitator, and co-editor of En•Trance Journal, she splits her time between a ranch in the Santa Cruz Mountains and a residence in Bellingham, Washington.
“Ghost Child” from Bonfire Opera, by Danusha Lameris ©2020. Reprinted by permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press.
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