My inaugural poem for this blog is actually a fairly recent piece of mine.
“Perchance to Dream”
Let me lie in open fields, and therein deeply dream
Surround me with your flowers: Living jade and serpent’s teeth
Let me drift gracefully as a demurred sun resigns
And dress me sweetly in honeyed ivory and your deepest wineFind a song that dances gleefully here upon the wind
A melody to serenade as I fall to sleep again
With stars above, I won’t forget the forest’s every tree
So lay me down in open fields, and there I’ll deeply dream© 2018 Andrew Drennen
Photograph by Lisa Stivers
The first line of my poem came to me, as many often do, unbidden. From there, I extrapolated through stream-of-conscious until I had the basics of this piece. “Living jade” refers to a plant stem, and “serpent’s teeth” is the plant itself: A dragon lily flower. As I came to realize how this sounded more and more like describing the death of oneself, I sought to describe the concept of being laid to rest, in this case as the sun sets.
The second stanza is a request of beautiful music to be played at a funeral. I accept reincarnation as a natural fact of life, hence “sleep again”. When one dies, it won’t be the first time they will have done so. Nor, very likely, will it be their last. Life is cyclical like that. I finish the second stanza with a forest being a metaphor for every event and every person one meets throughout their life – each root, limb and leaf in one’s path affecting their journey, even in some small way. With the death passing and the burial finished, one is laid to rest as night sets in.
“To sleep, perchance to Dream; aye, there’s the rub, for in that sleep of death, what dreams may come…” from Hamlet’s opening soliloquy, in which he ponders death. My initial intentions had simple been to write something that sounded beautiful. The meaning came on its own.