A Fruitless Journey to the Dreaming Land

ORIGINALLY WRITTEN FOR A FRIEND’S BIRTHDAY. INSPIRED BY DREAMING LAND, ONE OF MY FAVOURITE PIECES BY EASTY BEASTY.

Artwork: Dreaming Land by Easty Beasty.

A woman — a girl —

Journeyed to find a garden.

She had heard — had been promised —

That amid the impossibly vast,

Impossibly red, dry expanse,

There lay a tranquil oasis

Abundant with birdsong,

Erupting with vivid emerald depths that

Would wrap her in their lullaby leaves and

Breathe her sweet affirmations at dawn.

As if in flirtation with the desert sands,

And in harmony with her horse’s lazed gait,

Her hips would rise and fall.

Day after day,

She rose and fell,

And rose and fell,

Her silhouette drifting,

Transmuting into the indigo nights,

In persistent pursuit of the garden that would cure her ills.

In the embrace of honeydew sunrises

She sang songs to the emptiness,

Relived days, conversations

Of love lost,

Of fear and of hope.

She picked and she ploughed at the corners of her soul,

And she gathered up moments of life like glass shards.

Hands sliced open, heart fragile,

She arranged them haphazardly into mosaic.

The woman — the girl —

Journeyed fruitlessly.

Without so much as the flicker of a leaf,

Or the shimmer of a puddle,

She drifted desperately, doubtfully,

Into the mundane abyss.

“Where are you leading me?”

Sang the tune of her heartbeat,

As the promise of the garden

Evaporated beyond the horizon’s edge.

On a hopeless night

Between exhaled screams

The girl plunged fist into chest.

At wit’s end,

Drenched in moonglow and impatience,

She pushed through ribcage,

Past muscle, brine, tendon, memory,

To take hold of her slippery heart,

Reef it from its cavity,

To lay it bare atop a rock.

There, in the midnight heat,

In the sparkle of the stars,

An explosion of her heart-life,

A conspiration of the elements:

Ocean teeming,

Dancing in time with the lilac fog,

Four iterations of self calmly meeting,

Holding each other at a juncture pierced by red sun.

The dreaming land was in her heart.

She held within her,

The garden she had searched for.