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Posts Tagged ‘dream’

Cast of Millions

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on February 9, 2026| 6 Comments »

There, on the dream marquis,
in big black all caps
were three words:
DEAR PEOPLE DARE.
I stood on the dream sidewalk
staring up into the vast
dream dark and thought,
someone made a movie
about tenderness—
real people finding courage
to offer love and care
to those who are wounded.
Which is all of us.
That’s when I woke,
determined to audition
for that show every day
for the rest of my life.

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 Late Night Flight

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on January 20, 2026| 8 Comments »


 
 
Expecting my daughter to come in
late, I slept lightly, attentive
to the slightest sound.
Imagine my surprise when my son,
dead four years, came into my room
and spoke soft in my ear
to let me know he was home.
I hugged him so long. Wondered
aloud why I hadn’t been expecting him.
Let him know his sister had
taken over their old room. Together,
we sorted through his old art projects,
old shirts, old shoes. When his sister
came home we hugged her, too,
and played chase, leaping over the bed,
the chairs, laughing, squealing, alive.
Soon, I was floating—zagging
through the air with wild delight—
not because I was trying to fly, more
like I was a leaf lifted by wind, soaring
with no effort of my own. I chased them
this way, through the dream to the day,
and our laughter was then and now
and somehow inside me forever.

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Dear Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on January 19, 2026| 6 Comments »


 
                  with language from the March on Washington Speech and the Letter from Birmingham Jail
 
Again we must learn how the destiny
of one citizen is the destiny of all.
We must learn we cannot walk alone.
The American dream of liberty
and justice for all is tarnished and torn
in the name of making our country great.
Where is our beacon? How many
deaths will it take? How much horror?
How much ache? Where is our dignity?
Where is our discipline? Where does
the dream still live? Is it in the icy streets
of Minnesota? In detention cells?
In the bare feet of the monks walking
our highways? In the hand-painted
protest signs all across America
proclaiming “We the People?”
Is the dream still alive in the gaps left
in government documents where words
have been banned, words such as “diversity,
woman, Native American, disparity,
inclusiveness, Black, equality, Hispanic,
oppression, community and immigrants?”
Is the dream in red blood in the snow?
In dried blood on the street? In voting booths?
In hope? Dr. King, you taught us we need not
be saints to make a difference. That like you,
we must show up frustrated and flawed as we are.
That freedom “must be demanded
by the oppressed.” Where is the dream?
Where does it live? How might it rise up
in our streets, recalibrate our minds,
and resonate like an anthem
ringing true in our chests?

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After Reaching for You

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on December 20, 2025| 6 Comments »


                  for Finn
 
 
There was a list. We were laughing.
This is all I remember as first light
enters the windows, slips
somehow through closed lids.
I keep my eyes closed in hopes
that if I am still enough I can grasp
an image tendril of the dream
and tug it closer.
For hours, it doesn’t work.
When I stop reaching, what is here
are real memories of you—your
head bent over the table doing math,
how jealous you were of your sister’s
snowman stuffy, the way your feet hung
over the end of almost every bed.
Is it true all I had to do was stop reaching
for the dream so that whole skeins
of memories could unravel and wrap
me in their long, faithful strands?
Is it true being still is now the best
way I can hold you? I am still.
Somehow in the softening, I don’t feel
your hand here in my open hand, but I do.
 

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After Effects

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on November 12, 2025| 4 Comments »


 
 
In the dream, Craig said to me, 
you know, Rosemerry, there
are fifty-eight kinds of loss. 
He pointed me to an easel
with a large blank page and handed me
a moss green pen. Here, he said. 
Fill them in. There were two columns. 
Loss of living. Loss of the dead. 
In minutes words filled the page 
like clover reproducing in a field. 
Loss of time. Loss of breath. Loss of love.
Loss of masks. Loss of shoulds. Loss
of musts. When I woke, I could
no longer name them all. But I
felt them growing in me, feel them,
still, flowerless and powerful,
exploiting any cracks in my certainty,
breaking me down from the inside,
making me softer, softer. Softer.

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Only When I Am Not Rushing

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on November 10, 2025| 8 Comments »


 
 
In the middle of a Monday morning
I let my hands rest in my lap
and truly feel them rest, feel
them empty and open, these
hands that scrub and type
and wash and chop and rub
and dig and yank and knit,
these hands that twist off
and turn on and lift up and
wring out, I let them rest,
and because they have slowed,
a dream from last night lands
in my upturned palms, a dream
in which my father arrives
wanting to write a beautiful letter,
so I find for him thick creamy
paper and an elegant black
pen with dark black ink and
I clear for him a wide cherry desk,
wipe clean the dust and oh,
how wide his smile then.
It is only in the honey-slow
moments I am able to receive
these sweet tendrils from the dead—
only when I defy the momentum
of the human-made rush and
enter into the pace of the real
that I feel the gifts of their presence.
As now, midmorning, my hands
still as fallen leaves in the grass,
fall open to receive my father,
his thick hands poised above the page,
his laughter ringing through the dream
and into this golden, sun-flooded room.

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Sleep Walker

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on August 27, 2025| 2 Comments »


 
 
Sometimes in my sleep
I walk with you. In the woods
or through the halls of a school
or once in a cave with turquoise pools.
We are almost always laughing.
Sometimes we play chase.
Only when I wake do I remember
you are gone. Is it any wonder
I like to linger in bed, sometimes
for hours, as if I could touch
the dream again, my eyes still closed,
my hands wide open.

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Morning

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on July 7, 2025| 6 Comments »


 
By the time I realized
I was dreaming of him,
it was too late.
 
Already, the dream
was vanishing like night,
like dew.
 
For an hour I lay there,
eyes closed, grasping
at glimpses. Losing them.
 
All I was left with:
He was happy.
So was I.
 
Finally, I opened my eyes
to this world where
he is not. And yet.
 
The sun was here warming
the bed. More truly, the sun
was not physically here.
 
The sun is somewhere
far, far, far away,
but that doesn’t stop it
 
from transforming
the whole room.

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It Won’t Go on the Resume, But

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on June 23, 2025| 6 Comments »


 
 
All I’ve accomplished today:
a newsletter, a few less weeds, some
scheduling, a talk with a friend.
But last night, in a dream, I flew. I flew!
I leapt from a cliff with a smile on my face
and not an ounce of fear in my body.
Truth is the fear came after the leap.
Came as I fell and feared I’d trusted
in myself too soon. But before the crash,
before the sick crunch of bones came
the weightless lift, the joy, the flight!
When I woke, I was stunned. I flew!
I flew without wings! I flew! I jumped
off the cliff and fell and fell. And fell.
And fell. And feared. And flew! I flew!
Today, the list of accomplishments
feels sparse. But all day, I felt it, the thrill
of what my body now knows it can do.
Can leap from cliffs with a smile. Can fly
even when I feel fear. It is not just a dream.
It’s a trust in my blood. I can leap. I can trust.
I can fly. It’s true, it’s true, it’s true.
Whatever is inside me knows that how to fly,
it guided me. And I flew.

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On Waking

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on June 4, 2025| 2 Comments »


 
 
Do you, too, love the time between dream and day
when we are gauzy and diaphanous,
more sky than clay, more the spiral than DNA,
love those moments before you remember
your name, before you remember the guns
and the bombs and the lines we have drawn
around right and wrong, before you remember the fingers
we point and those pointed at us and the blame
we shove back and forth. Even now, midday,
if, still, we close our eyes and breathe,
we can almost return to the innocence of it,
can almost feel the weightlessness, the wildness,
the generous knowing of being without measure,
without border, without label, without should.
Imagine we could meet in that undefined space,
that liminal, boundaryless place. All of us nameless
at the very same time. It wouldn’t last. The alarm
always rings. But what if when we all emerge,
some of that spaciousness would cling to us
as we make coffee. Open the door. Drive the car.
Say hello. What would we make of the news?

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