Healing Dream
Healing Dream
Three days before my mother died,
the family on deathwatch,
I had a dream, remembered a song
I received on a mountain trail.
It guided me to find the dark tower
defending the foothills where
the skirmishes happened, to ascend
a spiral stair where a beacon once burned,
where a sacred fire was allowed to die,
I stir up the ashes to find a living spark.
Throw open the door of my heart,
to face my truth, where I am,
and fall into dream.
This is your task, the song continues,
to go through these agonized meetings
with the crouching cougar of your mind
on the ladder of the angels to God,
to climb past mistakes and relationships
where you hadn’t learned to hold the reins
on words, actions, feelings.
Now I am able to honor the elders, departing
and departed. The mountain song carries me
to take a step beyond my small self to a fullness
of heart where earthly losses are dissolved.
I step out in dream world,
I am astral travelling across treetops,
a forest dark where campfires of the ancestors
are burning; I fly to the far side of the river
of pain that flows through the painting
that hung in mother’s dining room.
I am inside it now; like a bird, I swoop,
and dip above tumbling water, gliding down
to ocean’s edge where forest turns
to savannah, and green hills bend to the will
of waves that give shape to the water’s edge.
My soul sings a song of power as it descends
from the high hill to the shoreline of a broad sea
dotted with white sails, boats on brave journeys,
a glimpsed promise, a horizon in the mist.
Copyright © Dave Holt | Year Posted 2021
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