Solitude and Sweet Sleep In a Place Rarely Visited

Painting by Carol McArtle


Solitude and Sweet Sleep in a Place Rarely Visited


I enter a place where ferns green the earth
Between cypress,
And there are blue-striped,
Fuzzy gold caterpillars
Turning into salt and oceans
Inside the curls
Of webbed fern leaf tips.

The hidden vibrations of metamorphoses haunt
The rain-bowed insect spotted air,
My life
Is holy and whole.

Tonight I will sleep on the ground,
And dream
The dreams
That the ferns
Have dreamed.


Duane Locke

Posted over on Poetry Repairs