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Whispers and Words #16 | Haunted by Humans

***

I am haunted by humans.

It's not a line I came up with. I am not that good a writer.

This sentence is from my favourite book. I won't reveal the name, because I don't need to. If the sentence was good enough to pique your interest, you might have already arrived at the answer by the space-age device called Google. (If reading this in 2025 or later, replace Google with ChatGPT, Perplexity, Meta AI or Gemini).

There was a time when you had to know the right books or the right people to be aware of things. And asking a question, a genuine, spontaneous query uttered out loud, wasn't met with a look of disdain, but of wonder. Your inquisitiveness wasn't snubbed by the phrase: Why don't you Google it?

I recall asking a question during an age when the internet wasn't as commonplace as it is now.

Is Alexander Fleming related to Stephen Fleming, the New Zealand Cricket team captain?

My biology teacher had no answer, nor did my friends. It wasn't relevant to the syllabus, so nobody cared.

I carry that question with me even today. I still don't know. And I just won't google or ask any AI the answer, like some of you already have. Keep the answer to yourself. I am satisfied with my sense of wonderment.

Coming back to the book, now.

Written in third-person POV, the story is narrated by Death. Not some God of death or harbinger of death. Just death, with a kind of sadness attached to him. Or her. As far as I can remember, the gender is not revealed.

When I completed reading the book, I could not help but marvel at the genius of the author in choosing Death as a narrator, someone who is omniscient and omnipresent, who watches and observes everyone, then reflects in melancholy without interfering with the flow of the story, which comes to an end with the following sentence.

I am haunted by humans.

I always wondered if the closing lines were supposed to begin a poem, but the writer chose not to.

Over the years, I attempted to write that poem myself, hoping that it would live up to the author's expectation and mine.

I finally did, yesterday. Here it goes...

I am haunted by humans,
Both dead and alive.
Lurking in the darkness,
They catch me by surprise.

Blessed with free will,
They made a conscious choice
To leave me to my own devices,
With my virtues and vices.

Now I find myself
Immersed in their echoes, still,
In the vacancy they left behind—
Never to fill.

The poem has no relation to the book's story, just my personal experiences. However, the starting line is an homage to the author, because when I first read the book, I hadn't written a single poem. Still, I went on a random pursuit of writing the poem that I had somehow assumed the writer had chosen not to write.

A sense of wonder brings a smile to my face now.

Was my favourite book the reason I became a poet? It's poetic, don't you think?

***

PS: I wrote my hundredth poem back in 2024.



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  1. Anonymous12:47 PM, February 24, 2026

    Taking a famous closing line and turning it into your own beginning — that’s a bold literary move.
    The part about refusing to Google the answer really stood out — in a world obsessed with instant information, choosing to preserve wonder feels quietly rebellious.

    And 100 poems later — I think the book did more than haunt you. It shaped you.

    ReplyDelete

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