I’m trying to see learning these days. Which means I’m looking for it in unlikely places. Like nightmares.

I’ve always been prone to nightmares. Today’s poem for National Poetry Writing Month is about that, a particular ongoing nightmare that reappears in my life sporadically. I have what are called ‘night terrors,’ although less frequently than when I was a child. I was an adult before I learned the name for them, or that others suffered them as well. It was a huge relief: I wasn’t crazy! Well, perhaps I am :). But not because of night terrors…

When they return, which they do now & then, I’m once again a child. And once again anything — particularly anything bad — is possible. Only now? I realise that ‘anything bad’ has a flip side: anything I can imagine. And that means I can shape dreams, if not night terrors. And believe me: my imagination is pretty active  ~

Here’s poem #2 for National Poetry Writing Month:

tell me anything you believe that isn’t a lie ~

I dreamed that I was all alone

still a young child

no one could hear me

no one would listen

it would come that no one

saw me – I was not really there

I wandered       like a ghost

 

I would try to fly

leave behind me   beneath me

the terror catching at my feet

the clutch of hands

the hungry hungry hands

 

but my wings would not carry

the weight of me

I was straining   struggling

fighting to fly

trying to climb a thermal

like a bird of prey

and all the time prey

silent

falling out of the sky