The Dreams of Winter's Dead
The Dreams of Winter’s Dead
i.(the death)
The winding down is soft and the running out is quiet.
light is there until it is no longer.
And the vigil is held and held and held
By evergreens, by stones
By the branches that gently let go of what
They can no longer bear.
The wind begs the question: Can they be remembered?
When all that's left is a memory of the shadows they once cast
Wreathed in warmth
Once new.
So the trees make a promise
Over the quiet winding and soft running out
That the vigil will be held, and held.
Until the light returns
The trees promise to remember how it felt to
Be wrapped up in cool, endless shade.
ii. (the sleep)
The sleep is fragile.
A nest like a scaffold, built of hopeful gestures
And misremembered moments
When they thought that they'd been seen.
But the songbirds pay no mind to what the dead believed themselves to be
And the wind blows through them all the same, shaking loose the fragile threads
The dead had sewn to keep themselves
To themselves.
Brightness, darkness, the skeleton of joy
And their pale bones all shiver
In the wind
A breath away from breaking.
Sleeping in a brittle pause of circadian rhythms
Only as long as ice is in the rivers' veins
And snow makes their eyelids heavy.
iii. (the dream)
Then when they wake up to their dreams, they do not see us standing.
Sitting.
Kneeling and waiting
and crying in our cars.
They are alive in their sleep, learning how from the hugging dark is born
Everything
And inside the blurry edges of memory and prophecy is
Everything.
We whisper the names of butterfly colors, and we feel less lost with the warmth of rain on our cheeks, but the dead still dream.
They don't hear our whenwillyouwake?
They hear a river clamoring as it discovers that in its colorless blood is golden glittering.
They don't see us grope for what they've shed.
The leaves they dream of grow brighter than any they've left behind.
If you’d like to have a digital compilation of this artwork, and the poem that accompanies it, please click here to download the e-zine which also contains my reflections on this collection of work.