Nod to AWW

The Dream That Wears Your Name

You woke inside a body and you called the whole thing you,
A name sewn on a borrowed coat, a face behind a face.
The universe put on a mask and stumbled somewhere new,
Then spent a lifetime wondering what filled the empty space.
We trace our fear back to the womb, to hunger and to cold,
And call the wound identity, the scar our signature.
But something older than our dread was watching to behold,
A dreamer who forgot the dream was never quite obscure.
The wave believes it is the sea’s most separate and alone,
It rises up in panic dressed in foam and green and spray.
But even crashing on the shore it does not crack the stone,
It only finds the ocean was beneath it all the way.
We build a self like scaffolding around a house of glass,
And guard it from the morning light with arguments and pride.
The ego wears philosophy to make its fortress last,
Yet wisdom is the unlocked door we bolted from inside.
I asked the silence what it was before I learned my name,
It answered with a birdsong and the smell of morning rain.
Not God in robes on mountains, not a torch of sacred flame,
But something vast and ordinary breathing through my pain.
You are not the river’s story, you are all the water flowing,
Not the melody remembered, but the music and the air.
The hand that draws the curtain back is always somehow knowing,
That the eye behind the curtain was already standing there.
We chase the thought that something waits at some arriving place,
That meaning lives in futures where our better selves reside.
But every step was whole already, every fall a kind of grace,
And every empty-handed moment nothing less than tide.
The child who wept at sunset did not mourn the disappearing,
He mourned that no one told him it would paint itself again.
The grief we carry most is not the loss but the not-hearing,
That beauty is not punishment and wonder is not vain.
So let the self unravel like a coat left in the rain,
Not into nothing, but into the everything it hid.
The dream is not a prison and the dreamer is not slain,
You are the one who dreamed the world, and look at what you did.
We are the question asking itself in forty thousand tongues,
We are the dark that needed light to know that it was dark.
The universe breathed outward and it found itself with lungs,
And called that finding human, and the human was the spark.

…

DCG