Dreamers

To Langston Hughes

You speak of dreams,

the drive that is the source of all creation,

the fire that pushed you higher than the insurmountable.

Your words, like flint in my soul,

have sparked that obsessive pull

that keeps pen returning to paper,

fingers moving relentlessly on a keyboard.

I read your words like a roadmap,

guiding me through love and heartbreak,

through joy and rage, through the lows of the blues,

and the incandescent highs of jazz.

Such sweet music, even in pain, dripping from your pen,

incites an eyes-closed, hallelujah feeling

in the deepest depths of this poet’s heart.

Can you see, in whatever corner of heaven artists reside,

how those dreams live on?

That seed you planted almost a century ago

is now a mighty oak, and the branches, too numerous to count,

if you look close enough, have bits and pieces

of your words etched with love through the hard-outer shell

to reach the green, ever-growing heart.

The dreamer in me looks to you in gratitude.


Posted at ABC Wednesday