Of his poem, poet Patrick Donnelly said, "Poems may arise from dreams, but when it comes to writing a poem based on a dream, I find it most interesting to leave it unclear whether we’re actually in a dream, or some other kind of altered state, or whether ordinary life has suddenly slipped into one of its less realistic episodes. In the end, I’m not sure those states are substantially different, given how our most intense feelings and memories shape what we see of the world, and what we think it means."
I have have had a life-long interest in dreams and have always said that at the heart of it all, dreams and waking life are interchangeable and indistinguishable from each other. Either way, we are perceiving people, places, events, and interpreting them through our emotions as best we can, creating the individual narrative full of our own personal symbology and meaning that fills our lives.
Dirk McDermott
by Patrick Donnelly
Fellow Scout who could climb and touch
the gold ball at the top of the flagpole,
and do math three grades ahead
under his crewcut. I need a calculator
to figure how long since I spoke his name.
How long since I offered my own blue
neckerchief to wipe his always runny nose.
But last night in smoke, steam, and rain
beside a wrecked train I told him how happy
I felt in the igloo we’d built, how handsome
a cub he’d been crawling on all fours
up the twilit tunnel to me. In a hoarse
whisper and never looking at his face.
https://www.patrickdonnellypoetry.com/
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