(Coniferous Forest, Ivan Shishkin, 1893)

Dreaming

Trees have a calmness in their silence

They whisper, talking among themselves in another realm–

the place where fairies live, I am told

It is only when we are silent do we hear them,

with our soul’s ears; our mind’s eye

The voices of the feathered echoing in the chambers of their majesty

a symphony of the skies if one listens closely

I listen

I jolt by the awakening,

back into my body, my eyes flutter, or is it my brain?

Either way, I am back

Gone far from the stillness that I found refuge

The cool air that was breezed against my skin,

the pillars of protection that surrounded me as I stood suspended in my escape

The mossy path below my feet softening my journey to nowhere;

to anywhere but where I am

Oh, how I want to go back where peace lives, where my stillness isn’t taken from me

Where I know I am not battered

My spirit not lost among the daylight

Joy suppressed, pushed down,

covered up by anger thrown at me, pummeling and constant

Drowning out the music…the whisper of the trees

Why must I endure this chastisement of who I am; who I want to be?

It is foggy as I begin to see

the white ghostly haze floating in and out of the trees, slowly lifting away

It must be a metaphor, the blurring of my reality

The lines never clearly defined; life never fully written