Hannah Bloom- Dream Juggler

time after time after time. . . Buried and forgotten, the nameless rise up from sleep’s deepest gravity and settle into the dusty corners of my muddled wakefulness. Why do you come? I ask. Is it to help sweep away those strange feelings and disbeliefs that remain as confusing and mysterious to me as when I first travelled on the train from Berlin to Prague and saw a forest of tree trunks all awash in ghostly white, and hardly even wide enough to hide the smallest child? Filled with shattered promises and painful longings, the nameless conjure up fantasies from long lost sun-drenched afternoons, where springtime leaves shivered in gentle breezes and the soft blue shallow pointillist waves licked at sandy shores; but is this scene, so reminiscent of Seurat’s La Grande Jatte, forever and only bound to his day? And now that I’m here, in this past’s future, I want to thrash out the old forewarnings, unbury the straw- covered earth, hunt for the broken, the perished, the forgotten, and find those worn-out souls traipsing through mud, while their eyes—sunk deep into gaunt faces—peer with hope between the twisted bands of barbed wire. Always remember us, my ghosts cry out in the dead of night. Never again, they plead in shrill voices. But these words remain unheeded in a world incapable of reimagining its past. And here I am, next in line, and frightened by the ugly rumors portending thunderous times ahead, while my ghosts remain helpless and locked up in their own era; as if their damaging world had never even existed. Never again: A promise. A dream. A fantasy, where deep in sleep, I dig to unearth the jewels of recollected memory, wishing to display them for everyone to see, as I might an array of twisty-shaped seashells gleaned from the water’s edge; and it’s here I discover a forgotten, a raw emptiness, where once upon a time, a gold bead lay gleaming, but then. . . . . .the summons of a newborn’s cry ruptures my dream.