Ghosts are supposed to frighten us, but the ghosts in Rachel Habraken's poem are too faded to manage even that. Her speakers, a collective "we", drift through "lifeless empty spaces" and gradually lose the power to be noticed. The central idea is fading: something once fierce burns down to residue, then to nothing, until it survives only as a rumour in other people's memories. The poem never says whether "we" means a generation, a community or a feeling, and that vagueness lets readers supply their own answer.
The opening image does most of the work. "We haunt these lifeless empty spaces, / Like smoke would haunt pyres / Of flames long extinct." Smoke is what is left when a fire is nearly finished, and a pyre is a funeral fire, so death is in the room from the first line. The comparison is slightly impossible, too. Smoke would normally have blown away long after the flames died, so the speakers are already something that should no longer be there. Then comes "And linger." It is the shortest line in the poem, a fragment left hanging on its own, and it does exactly what it says.
Fire returns in "our destructive passions are diminishing", and here the poem gets interesting. The word "destructive" suggests that the dying-down should be a relief, a calming. Yet the consequence is erasure, not peace: "To wane away and become phantoms." Judging by the wording, the speakers cannot lose their capacity for harm without also losing their substance. "Wane" is a slow, moonlike word, a long way from the violence of "destructive".
What follows is a staircase downward. The speakers "surrender to predestined recession", sink to "the woeful depths" and are "quieted endlessly so". Everything moves backwards or down, and nobody acts. "Predestined" removes choice, and in "we are quieted" no one is named as doing the quieting. The trailing "endlessly so" even loses grammatical energy, as if the sentence were running out of breath. Then "We dispel like exhausted ghosts" uses a verb we usually attach to something else, since we dispel doubts, fog or smoke. Here the speakers disperse themselves, completing the smoke of the opening. Their "actuality", a cold, almost bureaucratic word chosen over "existence", is "disbelieved". This reverses the ghost story, in which the ghost usually insists on being believed in.
There is no rhyme and no regular metre. Lines swing from the long, heavy fifth line to the two-syllable "And linger", and almost no punctuation interrupts the drift. The poem is held together by repetition instead. "We" begins four of the thirteen lines, and "I" never appears, so no single voice stands out, which suits a poem about losing individuality. The verb "haunt" frames the whole text. The first "We haunt" attaches to a place, "spaces". The last attaches to time: "We haunt in only the bygone memories." The speakers have been pushed out of rooms and into recollection, with nowhere left to stand but other people's pasts.
The title adds a final twist. Ghosts belong to the past, yet these are ghosts "of our future", while nearly every verb is in the present tense. The poem folds time over on itself: what is coming is already happening, and that future will look back on "us" as "bygone". I read this as a warning about burning out or being forgotten, though the text leaves the cause open.
The poem's significance lies in this quietness. It takes a familiar gothic figure and makes it unmenacing, so the unease comes from indifference, not from fear. Some of the language is abstract, and the grammar occasionally wobbles, but that stiffness suits speakers who have been drained of colour.