Death is dressed in white,
bed-sheet pale, with rasping breath;
his callous hands caress the child,
whisper words of anguish, calling
for a fever-ridden sleep
of his fatal consumption.

Talking in tongues of his mother
he cajoles with the coldness of snow
on the moonlit wake of a corpse.

The child will remember the night
when left alone at a deathbed
he had to cover his ears for the calls
from him, the palest of ghosts.

Melissa gives us three images of to depict haunting at dVerse today. She tells how some of the paintings has been said to invoke sounds and various strange matters. The image by Edward Munch to me also told the story of the white plague or tubercholosis which was a huge killer up till the invention of antibiotics. My father did have it as a child, and was actually living in Oslo when he was sick, so the story tells me a lot. I call the child a boy, both because it could depict the painter whose mother died from tubercholosis when he was young. At that times young boys and girls or toddlers where dressed in this kind of dresses.

October 20, 2026