I saw him standing at the gate of heaven. It
was in a dream, but seemed so real I was in awe.
Behind him in my vision all was white and lit.
Dear reader, though hard to believe, I truly saw
this most magnificent of men. He was all shine
and smiling, like he was inviting me to draw
close, come. His costume draped upon his body fine.
He was so beautiful he blazed from head to toe.
He seemed so good, o, dark of skin, but pure, divine.
I wondered what it was that made his body glow.
I longed to enter in that lovely infinite.
I wanted so to join him there in all that glow.
This is an unusual poem to come back upon one decade later. The poem arrests me for several reasons:
1. It is a bilding (12 x 12, ababcbcdcdad);
2. it portrays a real dream, but sans the typical negative feelings that plague my dreams;
3. and at the time, Poe’s “Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym”, the “Old Testament”, and Homer’s “Odyssey” were uppermost in my mind.
It does strike me that, as usual, no one responds to my poetry; though, really why would one? In addition, I have to admit, a decade on, that my mind does not reproduce that visionary image I saw back then; in other words, I can’t resee it, and I only have this bilding as a record of it. What strikes me about the diction is its simplicity. There is nothing really surprising, except perhaps the common Romantic-Era phrase “dear reader”. I suppose this dream-poem is really nothing more than a longing for that ideal realm Homer envisioned in “The Odyssey: Book 4”. I think if the poem were to appear again, I would change the charichord to Seer Ablicudew.