Patricia Behrens

Hoping to see the green flash

from my beachfront table

I watch sun drop down toward

the Caribbean, the light so blazing

over the water I shouldn’t be looking.

But there is a rumor someone saw

a green flash here at sunset

just the week before. Pirate lore

says the green flash signifies

the return of a soul from the dead.

No one says if anyone returned

last week. I watch the horizon

slice down the sun’s disc—it’s

three-quarters, a half, a quarter,

a sliver. When it is almost time

I imagine my husband returning.

Would he want to come back? 

Did he join family, friends, old lovers?

So few friends left here. And his work—

so much of that gone, too.

Scientists called the green flash mythical

until they understood it, how light waves

bend and refract until sometimes, as sun

setting over water falls just below the horizon,

only the spectrum’s green reaches the eye.

Someday, will they explain ghosts

like that, too? Say that people do

come back, can be fully here, although

only a vaporous white something

can be seen by the eye?