We all
have dreams, and some come true. Many dreams, though, remain just that...dreams. Even so, life goes on. Yet, getting real, being positive, and moving forward does not mean having to live a single dream behind. On the contrary, the likelihood is that every dream that finds a place in mind, body and spirit will continue, each in its own way, to inspire us to be a better person.
I recall having a nightmare as a child. My mother reassured me that it was only a bad dream. 'There's good and there's bad. You have good dreams, too, right?' she said. I nodded. 'So trust the good ones to get the better of the bad, and you won't go far wrong,' I can still hear her whispering in my ear although she died nearly 40 years ago.
Gay or
straight, no one can take our dreams away from us and any who criticize, even condemn us for going along with a dream come true, especially in the shape of someone to love, quite simply hasn't a clue...
This
poem is kenning.
SWEET MYSTERY
OF LIFE (AND DEATH)
I cherish
hopes of spring,
nurture
them like misty showers
encouraging
flowers to grow,
buds on
trees to come to blossom,
fruit or
leaf, as they will
though
some fall foul of a sudden
gust of
wind or children
come to
make sport with nature’s
finer
talent for creation
I sing a
song of summer
though
autumn leaves consigned
to
compost heaps
where
swallows desert the places
that gave
life to their young
and the
likes of me poems to pass on
though
winter sure to teach
us
lessons in survival even a robin
can but
do its best to learn
Winter
come and gone,
hopes
winging on a swallow’s return,
lifeless
branches budding
nature
returning me, also, to a life
badly
bruised by winter’s
show of
not even caring if we last
or fade,
you or I, especially
given
unlooked for intervention
by forces
natural or human
But let
me, the dream inspiring you,
in my own
way, like spring, run true
Copyright
R. N. Taber 2009
[Note: This poem first appeared in an anthology From Coast to Coast: a Forward Press Regional Collection in 2010, and subsequently in my collection Tracking the Torchbearer (2012) under the title A Question of Trust.]