dreams

Summer-nap

I drifted into a summer-nap
under the hot shade of July
serenaded by a cicada lullaby
to drowsy-warm dreams
of distant thunder…

Terri Guillemets

P.S.  Thank you to everyone who let me know about USA Today and King Features Syndicate using this poem for their July 5th Cryptoquote. —tg, 2023

Pink pony

“Stored away in some brain cell is the image of a long-departed aunt you haven’t thought of in 30 years. Stored away in another cell is the image of a pink pony stitched on your first set of baby pajamas. All it takes to get that aunt mounted on the back of that pony is to eat a hunk of meatloaf immediately before going to bed.”

—Robert Brault, rbrault.blogspot.com

The Wharf of Dreams

Strange wares are handled on the wharves of sleep:
Shadows of shadows pass, and many a light
     Flashes a signal fire across the night;
Barges depart whose voiceless steersmen keep
     Their way without a star upon the deep;
And from lost ships, homing with ghostly crews,
     Come cries of incommunicable news,
While cargoes pile the piers, a moon-white heap—

Budgets of dream-dust, merchandise of song,
Wreckage of hope and packs of ancient wrong,
Nepenthes gathered from a secret strand,
     Fardels of heartache, burdens of old sins,
     Luggage sent down from dim ancestral inns,
And bales of fantasy from No-Man’s Land.

—Edwin Markham, “The Wharf of Dreams,” The Man with the Hoe and Other Poems, 1899