Between the Nightmare and the Dream
In my grandpa’s field I stand midst rows of grain
whose gray-green blades stir softly in the moaning wind.
A night chill permeates my skin.
I look down at my arms and legs and realize
I’m a little girl again!
How did I get here? Why am I now standing here in the dark of night?
Far ahead of me, I see the old worn farmhouse.
Moon, big and golden, seems to have left the sky.
It’s reappeared at the window of my grandparent’s old house,
where it glows with a mesmerizing light eerily beckoning me.
I stand transfixed, not knowing what to do.
Is this a dream? It has to be!
Grandma sold that house when grandpa died.
I’d seen it one more time remodeled and repainted
and with another owner’s name.
The house I’m seeing now is the old one from my childhood.
Many things from long ago are coming to my mind:
The fields where my sisters and I frolicked in the summers;
the long dirt lane we skipped happily along;
the berry bushes along many pathways we discovered;
the hollyhocks we learned how to make cute dollies from.
It was daylight when I knew the farm back then. Sun was high in the sky.
Now I’m only seeing the eerie glow emanating from grandpa’s house. . .
I awaken to the darkness of a winter morning’s gloom,
vaguely remembering a vanished moon
which turned up on the face of my grandparents’ old farmhouse
as if to beckon me back to my childhood.
But somehow I knew (even while asleep)
that to near that house and then to go inside it
would not be the stuff of happy dreams.
There was a reason for the coldness of the night, the moaning of the wind.
The summer days have fled. Between the nightmare and the dream,
subconsciously I knew
you simply cannot go home again.
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