Photo courtesy of cbsafari.com

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Today’s prompt “takes its cue from our gently odd resources, and asks you to write a poem based on an image from a dream. We don’t always remember our dreams, but images or ideas from them often stick with us for a very long time. I definitely have some nightmares I haven’t been able to forget, but I’ve also witnessed very lovely things in dreams (like snow falling on a flood-lit field bordered by fir trees, as seen through a plate glass window in a very warm and inviting kitchen). Need an example of a poem rooted in dream-based imagery? Try this one by Michael Collier.” ~ NaPoWriMo, Day 4

I tend to write about dreams a lot–about “entering a dream, being chased by a dream, finding solace in a dream, the impossibility of waking up, dream as terra incognita, dream as a world I had known before I was born, dream as afterlife, dream dream dream.” The previous excerpt is from a piece I wrote about the importance of dreams in my life. It’s available here. And here’s a bevy of dream-based poems: Four Nightmares, Family Lore, The Photograph, Falling Asleep with Carpenter Bees, Minotaur, Out of the Labyrinth.

As for our prompt, I wanted to do something different, perhaps less serious and more playful, even campy (why not?). The poem below is partially based on my husband’s dream. In it, he was playing King Lear while having to do a bunch of other organizational stuff and forgot his lines. Below is my take on both today’s prompt and my husband’s hilarious dream–with his permission.

PS–Most of the poems written this April will remain online for up to five days, after which they will be replaced by an excerpt, an erasure, or a thoroughly amateurish art piece that will only allow for bits of the original poem to peek through. At least, this is the plan. The reason being that, at some point, in the hopefully not too distant future, these drafts will undergo revision and begin their multiple-year pilgrimage through the slush piles of many a literary journal. So help me, O Muse.

PPS–Once again, time did its shtick and left us five days older. Which means that an erasure has replaced the original poem, but one that has kept an important character in it. I enjoyed my yesterday’s guests, the angel seashells, so much that I asked them to stick around and help me stage today’s erasure. They did–and brought a friend.

Poetry from the trenches, Day 4

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