Magic’s Middle

(featured image by “blondie blu”)

Fire-blossom’s exciting (and hard) Friday Challenge at Real Toads. Here goes nothing’ (I’m choosing to write about a dream I had as a little girl that I never forgot, and it’s still just as vivid):

A red and white gingham tablecloth, light and worn thin,

overhanging the table and gently moving from the mountain air

coming in through the window.

Strawberries. The woman here has them in a green plastic crate

on the checkered pattern. I can’t see her in this part of the dream,

but she is bustling somewhere in this cottage built half in the hillside,

watching me tenderly.

Out the window, I must be climbing out of it…

and I see the patterns I’ll carry with me in dreams to come:

the deepest green grass with millions of tiny blossoms

dotting the expanse before me like a Monet painting in HD;

a line of tall spruce and pine border the horizon,

I am surrounded by a curved fish-eye wall of forest,

I am the center of the field, I am the flowers, I am the white

petals and yellow centers that promise more berries.

The mountain air is so clear and clean–I am magic’s middle;

and a chill comes on. Maybe I have goosebumps,

the old woman in the cottage takes the strawberries away

and cuts the gingham cloth.

I heard her humming in my head twenty-two years later,

when all was lost; it was her voice

I heard, it was her presence that calmed me in the pitiless night

and I listened, her words forgotten as soon as she said

them, but it was the hum, the tone, the incantation and cadence.

She calls me to the window

and I greet her with elation and abandon

“Child, oh my child,”

her voice is quiet, but I hear her;

the spell mourns;

the lines in her face

her bosom resting on loose-skinned

forearms on the sill;

what is this look in her face? Her blue eyes,

her babushka wrapping her hair,

tears blinked away almost unnoticed

“My girl, it is time to go.”