There are poems that do not speak so much as emanate—thin, luminous vapors rising from the fissures of the ordinary, murmuring things we have long buried beneath the noise of clocks and names. Awakenings is one such apparition: not a poem, but a pulse, a breath drawn by the dreaming mind of the world itself. It doesn’t begin—it simply continues, as if we are walking mid-thought through a labyrinth that has no center and no circumference.
To read it is not to understand, but to remember. To feel that faint, vertiginous quiver as the coordinates of self begin to dissolve. It is the slow unfurling of a mirror folded within another mirror. One looks in and sees not their reflection, but the shimmer of a thousand selves exhaled and inhaled through time.
"So wake again.
Not as the one you were,
But as the one who has always been."
Not a command, but a spell. The words do not urge transformation—they dislodge the illusion that there was ever a fixed form to begin with. This is not rebirth, but recognition: the soft, terrifying realization that you have always existed, pulsing quietly beneath the scaffolding of your own forgetting.
The poem moves like breath over glass. Its silences are as loud as its lines. In its heart sleeps the soldier—not a man, but a mythic echo, a sleeping archetype wrapped in the gauze of centuries. He lies in the folds of language, curled beneath the syllables, listening. Waiting for the world to blink.
Time in Awakenings behaves like a fever dream—it loops, trembles, evaporates. Moths with wings of vellum flit through its verses, scattering the dust of memory, and each flutter binds moments into one infinite now. “So fragile, / So infinite”—the paradox at the core of the cosmos.
The heartbeat, that ancient metronome—
“a drum echoing through the caverns of the world”—
becomes more than sound; it is structure, substance, a geometry of being. It connects the reader to something that predates both language and thought. The poem doesn't merely describe this heartbeat—it is that heartbeat, incarnated in stanzas that throb with primordial longing.
But Awakenings does not ascend into abstraction. It dives downward, burrows into the roots. It speaks of the detritus clinging to the soul—
“old forms / That have wrapped themselves around your soul / Like the dust of ancient roads.”
It is excavation, not escape. A peeling back of sedimented selves. The poem invites you to become again what you never ceased to be: a flicker in the field of all flickers, a breath in the great lung of time.
There is, within it, that unmistakable bend in reality when the ordinary begins to unravel, and you see, suddenly, how thin the veil is between what is and what has always waited underneath. Time becomes a Möbius strip. Identity a recursion.
And in this spiral:
“You are the dream, / And the dream is you— / Both fleeting and eternal, / One and many.”
The dreamer dissolves into the dreamed. Self becomes echo, then origin, then echo again. The poem does not answer. It circles, loops, shimmers. It becomes a tunnel of mirrors with no exit—only the slow widening of the eye that sees.
In Awakenings, dualities crumble. Sound and silence converge. Presence and absence collapse into a singular flicker of being. The poem does not so much speak to the reader as enter them—like a breath, like a memory that never belonged to them, and yet always has.
This is not a poem. It is an opening. A door left ajar between the visible and the invisible. A call not to awaken, but to remember that we have never truly slept.
https://www.poetrysoup.com/poem/awakenings_1694501