(Inspired by Langston Hughes’s DREAMS)



I

As the Sun, and its generosity,
returns to my neck of the woods,
the heat in the frisky pair of 
wild hares that stop to take in 
this lumbering bipedal creature
that I am, wakes me up from my stupor, 
staring at the ball of fire in the sky;
bypassing the heat within me.

The flowery wild ones have struck up 
thrilling symphonies on the forest floor.
The trees agree and blush,
as the deer lean and scratch themselves
while flirting with one another,
galloping and greeting the retuning sun;
a Sun that never left, but for the 
turning Earth that has to hold space for 
eternity to keep reaching for infinity.

The tree burns with news 
the Sun’s brought from the south 
where it’s been all winter, 
while I shivered with the 
shock that in this place 
my dreams, full-winged birds 
though they are,
cannot fly. 
I long mistook this shock for 
the cold dark winter, 
as my fingers froze around my dreams
despite what the ancestor Langston Hughes said, about holding fast to dreams.
What is the point of living free in spirit, I ask, 
when deprived of freedom in the Blackness of this body, in this place, 
where full-winged birds cannot fly?


II

Hey, Pssst, You!, the tree calls to me as 
I hug it and cry into its loving, yet craggy,
and seeming hard indifference.
Pick up those full-winged dreams
you just flung into the frozen mud.
See how I unpack what I stored away as the 
Sun went south? 
Now, as it returns, I unpack what I 
packed tight into the winter of my life. 
For in this place you call the woods, 
winter or spring, summer or fall, 
I palpitate with cool, fiery life.

So grab your dreams and 
fling them to the sun, 
who will catch them and you! 
If you don’t, your dreams, 
and you, will become 
“…a broken-winged bird
That cannot fly.”
As that German saying said: 
Es sind nicht die Flügel, 
die den Vogel ausmachen. 
Es ist der Flug.
It is not the wings that make the bird. 
It is flight.
You are that! 
Fly! Now!