We’ve all had the dream; a loved one who has died revisits us in our sleep. They always seem to appear just before we awaken; they seem so real. Even if you realize, in a moment of dream lucidity, that they are dead, the wish for them to once more be with you is overwhelming.
And when you awaken with every sense of your being knowing it was a dream, you once again crash to Earth.
Sonnet 8 is one of my favorites. I wrote it as in a dream; the words came in a torrent.
Sonnet VIII-A Joyful Sadness
A joyful sadness roils in my soul
‘Ere thoughts of loved ones left life come to call.
No longer doth I dive; bleak, black as coal
Fain welcome them: their souls, hearts, one and all.
Now my heart, once asunder, springs in joy
My heart, once toppled, leaps in simple glee.
Their image doth return; pure, unalloyed
When visitors, now gone, return to me.
One cannot fix the past nor make amends
With those whose lives are gone for all eterne.
Indeed, if spirit’s passed beyond our ken
Pleased, it shalt be for goodness thou doth yearn.
One cannot draw them back, they are but dream.
Hark, when their spectres glow, savor the gleam.
March, 2019
