the ocean always dreamed blue dreams

I'm reading a book now called "Down the Nile, Alone in a Fisherman's Skiff" by Rosemary Mahoney. The title is fairly self-explanatory, but Ms. Mahoney excels at describing the people, the culture, and the land of Egypt.

I was particularly struck by a passage about a woman she encounters and her hopes and dreams for her own life. Most of the people Ms. Mahoney encounters live in poverty that is somewhat dire. The woman she refers to is not going hungry, but she does suffer from hunger of another sort.

"Safaa...had the air of one whose ambitions had been thwarted at every turn...Safaa grabbed the TV remote...clicked it off...then she turned to me and began to speak with rueful envy. Outside Egypt things were different, better...Sometimes she wanted to go to Kitchener Botanical Garden alone just to sit and relax and look at the pretty trees that she had heard so much about, but she never mustered the courage to go there... "

It seems to me that wherever we live in the world, we, as humans, have dreams and modest ambitions, and to fulfill them in some way is important. Perhaps as important as having a full belly, one must have a dream fulfilled, and one waiting in the wings...Langston Hughes probably said it better, but here's my contribution to dreams, deferred.


Mozart on the Wing

My dreams, how they compel me
I watch them, like feluccas, in the Nile,
in the sun
beyond reach, they flutter beguilingly
their sails flapping in the breeze
Oh beauty!
they call to me, in voices of dark harmony

at the end of the day they rest,
darkened, matte, powdery, in a box
that I set unthinkingly on the messy
stack of books beside my bed
and there they lie
until retrieved
or rescued by a drop of water and a sable brush

they take flight, then, across the sky,
a flock of starlings
beaks open in full-throated song,
mozart on the wing

Qimissung