Poetry list
A cinquain of sleep
In sleep we find a strange and distant world
Both like and different from the one we know:
Our senses keen against all reason hurled,
Are caught in night time’s tide and undertow
Then tossed ashore when morning’s light does show.
Yet nearly half our lives are spent asleep –
Our worldly strength and status set aside.
We seem to die when lying still so deep,
And all can happen as we rest and slide
Into the realms where laws no longer guide.
Do dreams have meaning for the daylight hours
To challenge all we trust and take for sure?
The sleeping soul encounters mystic powers
That shake our waking truths and so inure –
Including dread and loss we all endure.
For some the night brings terrors of its own
With madness strange and torments near and real:
To wake in sweat and shiver, cold as stone.
The mind is scarred, and fear is all we feel:
The sleeping worlds disturbing truths reveal.
Why, then, the future meets our dreaming night,
Interpreters make sense of stories wild
And tame them into visions clear and bright.
But is our reason overturned, beguiled,
By signs and portents in our dreams compiled?
The greatest gift of sleep is healing rest –
A spring whose waters bubble to restore,
Our weary flesh and minds by cares distressed.
We lie in time to face an open door
Whose threshold beckons us to heaven’s shore.
© Neil Thompson 2024