06 November 2014

Bone Dreams


I dreamt last night.
It answered my question
about whether the dead dream.
Must mean dreams come from bones
not brains, bones as scaffolding 
for psych and soul with the DNA of generations 
carried deep within 
bones' marrow.

But about that dream,
some ancestral reverberation 
straight from the marrow,
grandfathers galloping through,
priests stealing things from children,
a girl rising up to accuse the priest,
she took things back too, wanted to reclaim
her grandfather's treasures, 
hand-carved.

That's what you can do with bones:
stand, yell, take, hold, dream.


Inspired by Grace at dVerse Poets Pub who wrote about The Book of the Dead Man by Marvin Bell and asked us for a poem written by one dead. The link has expired but here it is posted for Mama Zen with Words Count in the Garden who wrote of the circus and requested 90 words or less about which performer you are. This is skeleton man, or dead man walking.

22 comments:

  1. WOW. this is so powerful, Mary! and gorgeous. priests stealing things from children. whoosh!

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  2. Your last two lines... whooeee

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  3. Such a powerful piece, Mary. We are haunted by bones, one way or another, throughout our whole lives.

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    1. It seemed easy to see things from their perspective.

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  4. A well conceived dream, which could easily have been written by one on the other side. Glad that's not you, though. :-)

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  5. heck...that part with the priest stealing things from children made me swallow... there are things that certainly can haunt us all our lives

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  6. dreams come from the bones....cool thought...and from our dna, passed on, there in the marrow too our voices of our ancestors...def a cool thing...became rather haunting though with that priest...ugh....

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  7. The unsaid speaks loudly in this poem...powerful opening stanza. Well written, Mary.

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  8. Oh! Makes me want to shake my bones (and cast them, reading futures from their pasts). Interesting from start to finish, very well written.

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  9. Bones follow us. We do our best to live with them or in spite of them. Great write!

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  10. Wowzers! this is fantastic. I can see a book of bone poems......

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  11. Wow! A surprising dream, and a powerful piece of writing.

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