© Barbara Grace Lake

 

What do you dream, how do you dream
Vignettes of persons passing by?
Astride grey horses snorting fire?
Across the sun, behind the moon
They’re going on.  I want to go.

 

My mother riding docile white
Beside my cousins Brenda, Bets
How gracefully they sit their mounts
Dense fogs are rising, I can’t see
They’re going on.  They tell me no.

 

They visit only in my dreams
As faces riding ghostly steeds
Dissolving as I try to see
They left a gift, a fragrant breath
They have gone on.  Their time had come.

 

On other nights, events are played
Each actor melts into the clouds
But just as these have parts still here
My role’s to live and love and give
It isn’t time to fly away,