Toni Morrison's "Beloved" has generated enormous influence on African American poetry, its central figure of the ghost-child representing the unresolved grief and guilt of slavery that haunts the present, a presence that demands acknowledgement before it can be laid to rest; A poet working with ghost narrative might write about returning to a family home to find it haunted by the specific ghosts of its history, the ancestors who lived and suffered there, whose presence is felt in the specific details of the building and landscape; The haint tradition in African American folklore provides a specific cultural framework for ghost narrative, with haints understood not as generic supernatural entities but as the restless dead who have not been properly mourned or who have unfinished business with the living; A student poet might write a ghost narrative poem about a demolished African American neighborhood, treating the ghosts of the community's former residents as present in the new development that replaced them, visible only to those with the cultural knowledge to see; Lucille Clifton's elegies for her mother and other family members engage ghost narrative by treating the dead as continuing presences whose voices the poet can access through the specific intimacy of grief; A contemporary poet might write about the ghost narratives embedded in American landscapes, the specific sites of racial violence that appear in the official record as empty land or unremarkable streets but that those with historical knowledge know to be haunted by specific deaths