Last night I dreamed I held a teacup
full of seagull feathers –
that precise detailing
of dreams – they were so white
and held the scent of sea, and fish-oil
a teacup is a pretty thing,
designed to hold,
and to be held. Man-made
there’s something here about my heritage,
my father’s family, rooted in the clay,
my mother, dainty on a shelf
but stronger than it looks.
That fine bone china
lets the light through.
The feathers seem so different –
there’s nothing wilder, greedier,
uglier, than a herring gull.
Gull snatches, smashes, steals,
a great white cry of “mine!”
but feathers are so beautiful,
and flight is freedom – to head out
unafraid, across the waves, wing tips
touching the white foam, the white sky
the white bird
The third thing is me.
We know our stories: the third
is power, the third wish
is the charm, the third child
wins the prize, the crone takes all.
In this dream, I’m serene,
I’m not surprised to find these feathers
where there should be tea –
I take a breath through kissing lips,
and blow.
white feathers fly, rising around me
like a cloud of cabbage whites,
or foam (again) or snowflakes. I’m engulfed
as if I’m trapped by freedom.
Then they fall, spiralling down,
and for a moment, I’m an angel.
This is for NaPoWriMo. Here’s the prompt, if you’re interested. You may feel the poem stands alone, and you don’t need to do any more reading.
And now for our prompt (optional, as always). Dream dictionaries have been around as long as people have had dreams. Interestingly, if you consult a few of them, they nearly always tend to have totally different things to say about specific objects or symbols. Dreams, unlike words themselves, don’t seem to be nicely definable! At any rate, today’s prompt is to write entries for an imaginary dream dictionary. Pick one (or more) of the following words, and write about what it means to dream of these things:
Teacup
Hammer
Seagull
Ballet slipper
Shark
Wobbly table
Dentist
Rowboat
Happy writing!
Sarah writes poems 