I Have had a Dream and My Spirit is Anxious to Know the Dream

King Nebuchadnezzar awakes in sweaty sheets
and cannot remember the dreams he dreamed.
Fulminating at the moon and dawn
the discomfited tyrant is defeated
by his misremembered reveries.

Daniel dreams of phantasmagoric goats
that rise from mounds of earth
to swallow the sun and to consume the stars,
of horned beasts that stamp and snort
and of dragons in the sea.

Jacob, the man on the run,
lay upon a stone to dream of angels
going up and down, up and down.

Joseph, the obnoxious little narcissist,
dreams of himself and his own superiority,
while Abimelech dreams of undeserved wrath.

The prophet, Zechariah, sees a vision in his sleep
of horses among the myrtles that are rooted in the depths
and flying scrolls that fill the sky with curses.

Pilate’s wife, whom we never meet,
dreams of an innocent man.

Job is terrified by what he sees
and would rather his soul be strangled
than remain his in his flesh with his dreams.

I, too, have had a dream
and my spirit is anxious
to know the dream I dreamed.

(2011)