Dreams: four poems

The Realized Dream
 
Its fragments
hopefully inhabited your mind,
Unified by the name
of what it was you wanted.


Working, waiting, hoping,
Doubting,
Groping to find your way

Until,
miraculously,
it came, and became truth.

You always knew
or weren’t sure
it would,
and then,
to your thumping heart
and joyous veins,
it did!

Pocketed in the folds of your memory,
You hardly noticed the death of the dream
amid your celebration.
_____________

The Unfulfilled Dream

At times it seemed so close,
skirting the edges of real life

You lured it with love,
enticed it with careful coaxing
as you might an elusive fish

Once or twice you dove in after it,
making a dripping fool of yourself

But it was worth the wet and wait;
For nothing could be more wonderful
than what it would be.

You hated that dream.
For it would be wonderful,
But it wouldn’t be!

Better to forget it;
You toss it behind,
a dead weight,
And set your sight on nobler,
easier feats.

Yet on some vibrating nights
It comes to warn you of regret’s torment.
Thrusting, thrashing, it moans to you,
“Take me back!”
And with each visit
every passing year
Shrinks the borders of possibility’s realm.

On such torturous nights of uncertain ending,
only sleep’s oblivion
holds any hope of morning.

_________________

The Unexpected Dream

My mind was coasting
in the asylum of duty,
Content to rest
in the movement of work

When then my lifted eyes
beheld a feastly vision,
As the first snow,
unannounced, refreshing my senses and soul;

Evoking embers of forgotten winters’ warmth,
breaths of frosty, sunlit air and setting sun;
past songs foretelling auspicious futures.

Such is the unexpected dream—
It awakens with blessings,
Like a basket from above,
overturned,
Sprinkling fragrant petals of poems,
or best of all, showering my spirit
with love’s pollen.

__________________

The Eternal Dream

Always it was with me, humming or howling,
The product and propellant of my atomic,
physical, or metaphysical particles

In a silent place of peace,
wordlessly I know it

In symphonic floods of chorus voices
Joyfully I sing it

In refreshing absurdities,
In another’s eyes,
In providential plans,
I laugh and see and speak it

It is a dream that is never fulfilled
But in its pursuit
I am made alive.

It comforts me with dissatisfaction
It consoles me with higher desires

When I approach it I rejoice,
though my rejoicing may be cold,
or furious, or poignant, or jubilant

My eyes do not see this dream
But they dream of it in ever-shifting colors,
and they love it.

Enigmatic, unknowable, familiar,
it calls me eternally.




November 24, 2012