Hold fast to dreams
For if dreams die
Life is a broken-winged bird
That cannot fly.
Hold fast to dreams
For when dreams go
Life is a barren field
Frozen with snow.
Dream Variation by Langston Hughes, from The Weary Blues published in 1926
there is a piece of my heart
that always and forever
leads me right back to
you
for the lonely,
the past haunts with a vengence
sometimes the details of life make it hard to breathe,
make it so that my heart feels squeezed and i tell myself to keep it together–
often i feel foolish because it isn’t over heroic acts or poetic words
it isn’t intense emotions over politics or rhetoric or what’s right or what’s wrong with the world–
it’s about a robin eating berries in the snow (why didn’t he migrate?)
and a detail in the railing that made me look twice,
it’s when a man holds his wife’s hand gently and absentmindedly caresses her arm,
it’s the 1968 photo where faces beam with hope and happiness,
and how his goodbye was a little hurried, like ripping off a band-aid and shaking off the sting
He was broken
and he was beautiful
a different kind of beauty
shadows are like morning webs,
tangled in our downcast lashes and hushed lips,
at once beautiful and terrifying
there, by the rolling stones,
by the line in the sand,
and the needles in the hay–
that’s where i found you
words haunt her
