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.
