Girl Awaits the Psychic Investigators

They’re late. The table is laid
with a clean cloth, all normal and neat.
Our visitors, city men, may find it hard
to navigate the path but we can wait.
They hope to gather evidence of a haunting;
whether he’ll oblige, I don’t yet know.
Does he discern them slipping up our track?
I might ask him; he might reply,
this weasel creature of firebright eyes,
my sharp-toothed other, our house familiar.
Some things I have admired in him include
his silky pelt attracting morning light,
the red stains stippling his jaw,
his preening cat-like proud upon the gate;
that photograph was in the papers..

I’ve noticed that the land around this farm
is demarcated in his winter-yellow tail.
Like me he’s seasonal and loves new words,
and poetry and sometimes, privacy.
Our visitors must surely find him interesting.
Will he annoy them in seven languages; Get out, it’s late!
Or amaze them with ‘Jerusalem the Golden’
(all the verses) then fall to curses?
His normal voice is needle, a scritch-scratch
that breaks skin. But boy, he can sing
and what a screech; he wakens me at night.
Soon I need to teach him dignified silence
to cope with the windswept emptiness
the other side of sound.
Not yet. It’s dusk and the tea grows cold.

But a light comes up the track
and it’s here they are at last, struggling
with ill-fitting boots and boxes
of devices to test the truth of him, of me.
The truth? Whose truth?
It’s true that sometimes he will make me laugh.
Sometimes I hate him and well he knows it:
Shut up. Shut up. Shut up!
When he gets angry or afraid he disappears;
you mustn’t ask me where he goes.
I’m capable and bright, I do well at school.
What else do they need to know?
That one day someone might shoot him dead?
Father would have done it once, Mother maybe.
I suppose if anyone ever does it, it should be me.

Annie Kissack is from the Isle of Man. In 2018 she became the Fifth Manx Bard. Subsequently published widely at home and further afield, she has two poetry collections, Mona Sings (2022) and A Suggestion of Wrens (2025).

Note: The apparent ‘haunting’ of Doarlish Cashen, a remote farm house on the west of the Isle of Man, by ‘Gef’, a wisecracking mongoose, attracted much Manx and international press attention during the 1930s. At its centre was the teenage daughter of the family.