Bogyman

Today, in this post, I found out that April is Poetry Month. So, I’ve been thinking about how to celebrate this event.

First, I decided to listen to poetry every day (here). Secondly, I thought I’d see whether I could find poems that present parallel experiences in my own life or in my life’s philosoph, and write about those.

This jewel of a poem, is by James Berry, and it concerns what to do when you encounter a ghost in the middle of the night.

The reason I relate so well to this poem is because when I was a wee thing in Venezuela, I was told stories about ghosts, witches, and bogymen*.

There was, actually, a bogyman living under my bed. My bogyman was nocturnal (well, aren’t they all) and lay in wait in case I got out of bed at night. If I did leave my bed, he would reach out and grab me by my ankle and pull me under the bed.

I never was told what would happen under the bed, but my four-year-old imagination was vivid enough to know that I really didn’t want to know.

Other than pulling me under my bed if I wandered in the night, my bogyman was a rather placid, even harmless being. I had this trick to knock him out for the night. I would turn off my light before going to bed, run across the room, and then leap heavily onto my bed, and bounce on the bed three times. This ritual never failed to put the bogyman “to sleep” for the night. It worked, for my bogyman never did manage to stay awake after doing this. Which I can prove by the fact that he never did manage to grab me by my ankles.

(* Adults told me these stories and not mean minded siblings. It was a cultural thing. This might be something a few of you will find hard to believe. Yet, I caught a Brazilian friend of mine warning her son not to go down into the underground garage at the apartment complex they lived in because a horrible witched lived down there. When I confronted her with the inadvisability of telling her son this, she said she preferred to talk about the evil of witches and ghosts, rather then warning her young son about possible encounters with people of evil intent. I’m not saying I agreed with her, but my friend’s explanation did give me another perspective on why I was raised with ghosts, witches, and bogymen.)