Just a Dream

When chariots race towards western skies

And disappear o'er the horizon's guise

I dreamed a dream of menace and fear

Resounding from depths of conscious unclear

Lone and dark a rider approaches

Carrying torch and flame

Shadow and death with him encroaches

But as yet I know not his aim

With arm raised high the night retreats

Stars outweighed by sparks and heat

Alighting all points between earth and cloud

Save an unseen face beneath the shroud

Through fields and pastures the stranger rides

Lowering his torch to the ground

Then touching every stalk of wheat beside

He unleashes a terrible sound

Fields fill the night with ash and flame

When in horror I hear the child cry out my name

"Father!" he screams as flames draw near

Yet in horror I remain paralyzed by fear

Misery abounds in the orange glow that reveals a dreadful truth

For to my son his mother runs, nearly out of breath

My noble wife, her beauty eternal, as captured in her youth

Trades outward splendor for inner grace and bravely stares down death

Fire consumes my wife and son while in terror I look on

Til the rider sifts through smoldering ashes with hands that are but bone

Death has claimed those I love most by unleashing its murderous plot

And left me here to weep alone...alone, my eternal lot

Through open blinds the sun casts its rays

Awakening me from my spell

Nightmarish dreams tarnish happier days

B A glimpse of both heaven and hell

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If I am too avoid criticism for writing dreadful poetry, it is only with pleas for leniency towards a novice's first attempt. This is the very first poem that I have ever written and I do so in response to a recurring dream that has haunted my sleep, a nightmare really, wherein all that I hold dear is taken from me in a moment of senseless horror. My dream resembles that of a scene in the movie Gladiator where Maximus returns home to find that his house has been looted, his fields burned, and (worse still) his wife and child murdered. In my dream, I am just a normal man of antiquity, with a modest home built atop a patch of good earth that stretches far into the horizon. On my land there are fields of wheat and barley, orchards of apples and dates, and a small river that runs east to west and disappears into the horizon where the setting sun turns its rippling waters into streams of gold.

One day, as I sit on the porch on some cool summer's eve, my beautiful wife beside me as we watch our son play in the fields that my own hands have worked, I see a great fire on the horizon. It consumes all before it and approaches quickly, so quickly that my son is soon overcome as his tiny legs cannot outrace the flames. My wife springs from her chair and races to save him, yet she too is engulfed by the flames and soon perishes. The fire surrounds my home, burning and destroying everything that I have ever worked to create until at last all is gone. The fire dies out, having consumed every patch of earth except the one I stand on, leaving me untouched by its blaze, yet surrounded by an ashen world that I no longer recognize. In those ashes is everything that once mattered to me, everything that still matters to me, but it is gone and I stand there alone...all alone. Still alive, yet somehow already dead.

This is the dream I have been having. I do not know why.