Lately, I’ve been drawn to writing poems that feel slightly unsettling — not horror, exactly, but moments that leave a thin film on the world. The kind of experience you replay later and still can’t fully place. Was it intuition? Coincidence? Something else entirely?
A few years ago I attended a weekend retreat in the countryside. One afternoon, we were asked to pair up with someone we didn’t know well. I ended up sitting next to a woman I’d never met before. The exercise was simple: hold the other person’s hand, close your eyes, and see if anything — or anyone — came forward with a message.
It sounds strange written out like that. But the room was quiet in the afternoon sun, and everyone took it seriously. I remember the warmth of her hand, the hush that fell over the group, and the way my mind seemed to tip into a different kind of attention—half imagination, half listening.
This is the poem that came from what I saw next.
The Man By the Water
A stranger asked me
to hold her hand.
I did,
closed my eyes
and saw
a man by the riverbank
dressed in a suit.
His polished shoes
stained with mud.
He gestured to the water,
to a small patch of thyme
growing at the edge
of the stream.
He smiled at me,
opened his mouth—
but a bird croaked,
and nothing came out.
When I opened my eyes, I could still picture him clearly. Black hair. A strong build. Too dressed up to be standing there by the river, as if he’d come from somewhere else and stepped into the wrong landscape.
I described him to the woman whose hand I’d been holding. She went still. Then she told me she recognised him — a former love.
She asked me to try again, to see if I could hear anything this time, to catch even a single word. I closed my eyes. I waited. But he never came back.
I still don’t know what to do with moments like this. Part of me wants to file it away as the mind doing what the mind does — making meaning, building images, filling silence. Another part of me remembers the exactness of it: the suit, the mud, the thyme by the water, the mouth that moved without sound. It didn’t feel like a story I invented. It felt like something briefly shown. The memory has stayed with me all these years.
Maybe that’s what these poems are for: not to prove anything, but to make space for what we can’t explain.
Have you ever experienced something you couldn’t quite explain — something that stayed with you long after? If you feel like sharing, I’d love to read it in the comments.
Related post: Three poems about the woman who won’t stay
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