We are continuing in this issue our ReCollection section, looking back through The BeZine past issues and blog posts in this, our tenth year. This poem comes from The BeZine Volume 1 Issue 5, on March 15, 2015. Our Founding Editor, Jamie Dedes, z”l, wrote this poem in 2008. She took the accompanying photograph in 2005.
Call Out for the Sacred Dream
Writing in a far and broken country, my pen
knows its kinship with the dark forest, asks
direction of its trees, celebrates a quiet amity
over the din of plastic medicine vials, the 40-foot
serpentine specter of a cannula, the hiss and sigh
of an oxygen compressor amid layered silences.
We are named on a long list of regional poets.
The region is the sickroom where the palm and
birch in the courtyard know their meaning and
place. Lend your soul's ear. The trees will speak
and tell you that we are found. We are here,
not lost in those vials but found in the hallowed
company of this dusty Earth on a shared vision quest.
Call it illness. Call it artful ... Strike up the hill. Cry out
for the Sacred Dream, for the purpose of your life and
its confusions. A comforting Infinity breaks through
fierce grievings embraced. The great dream comes
to you. The trees come to you. They speak in God's
tongue, which is - after all - your whispering heart . . .
Life gives, bequeathing the key to its wide and
wild Essence. Unlock the door. Listen ... listen!
The voice is lyrical and trails records in blue ink.
“There is on this earth, what makes life worth living,” Mahmood Darwish (1941-2008), Palestinian poet —an observation as true for people who are occupied by illness or other distress as it is for a people who are living in occupied territory.
Photograph ©2005, Poem ©2008 Jamie Dedes
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