My Poetry

Free Verse #8

Dream Journal
Italicized lines from "To A Friend" by Daniel Halpern

What a young girl you must have been
when you wrote that journal,
plucking petals from flowers that only exist beyond the shifting veil
of reality and taping them down with strips of hope.
But yesterday I pulled out that journal.
The petals are drying,
and the tape curls at the edges.

You are dead.

Sometimes I see you beyond that veil,
but whatever power you had to pluck those petals
and bring them across,
I do not possess. I cannot bring you back.
Your death wasn't sudden.
No, it was slow but persistent,
like darkened honey dripping from a pot.

It took years. Why didn't I notice?

I think it started when,
starving for attention,
you looked away from your seat at the table
and saw that the seat next to you
had been given a three-course meal while you got stale bread.
When they were given brand new clothes while you made do
with hand-me-downs that you couldn't make fit.
When they got hours while you got only a second,
and was told to be grateful, too.
Could they not see that you were starving?
Is suffering sustenance to anyone?
But you only finally died when you entered a world
that proved too cruel to stand.
I clutched to that journal, because
that's all I have left of you.

I cannot properly mourn you, because you did not die in body.

You died in spirit, in hopes, in dreams.
But when your spirit gave up on this world,
you left behind an empty vessel, a fragile shell.
But a body cannot survive like that,
and so the universe created me.
You became a spirit without a body,
and now I am a body without a spirit.

When you died, you left behind a ghost.

You left behind a woman that has grown
far too used to the chill of isolation.
You left behind a woman
with more demons than hopes,
more nightmares than dreams.
You left behind a woman
too scared to say "I love you" to the children
she raises eight hours out of the day
in fear that the words will come to mean nothing
and those children end up like you.

You died as a girl who believed the world could be good.
I live as a woman that can't even see the good in herself.

To the girl I used to be,
I miss you. I'm sorry I couldn't save you.
You used to believe in stars,
in light that could chase away the darkness of your fears.
But without you, my skies are starless,
and there is no light to banish the cold and dark.

So now the petals turn to dust
and the tape peels off the page,
because your dreams,
your hope,
your spirit,
you
are dead.