Blog o’ Gnosis

Okay, well I guess I am now collecting poems having to do with dreams. (Suggestions? I’d love to hear them.) I spent some time this evening browsing through a friend’s poetry collection, and came up with this beauty that I had to share. I don’t know whether Reya is doing her Poetry for Brigid blog this year, but you know it’s going to happen anyway, even if nobody sends out invitations, because it’s such a great idea. Anyway, here’s my first contribution in celebration of the return of the light.

Dreams
by Mary Oliver

All night
the dark buds of dreams
open
richly.

In the center
of every petal
is a letter,
and you imagine

if you could only remember
and string them all together
they would spell the answer.
It is a long night,

and not an easy one–
you have so many branches,
and there are diversions–
birds that come and go,

the black fox that lies down
to sleep beneath you,
the moon staring
with her bone-white eye.

Finally you have spent
all the energy you can
and you drag from the ground
the muddy skirt of your roots

and leap awake
with two or three syllables
like water in your mouth
and a sense

of a loss–a memory
not yet of a word,
certainly not yet the answer–
only how it feels

when deep in the tree
all the locks click open,
and the fire surges through the wood,
and the blossoms blossom.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 24th, 2007 at 10:10 pm and is filed under Dreams, Poetry. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.