Of our home- Dreamsville.

Once upon a time in Time,
A man came panting to our town
His eyes were red and head tousled,
On his face was set a frown.

He said, “I have come from a land afar
To question you of your false fame, sire!
My feet are tired but my heart won’t rest,
Until I get my answers – oh, need is dire.

You are people of a town so great
You live and sell, and play with dreams
It is here that they are born, from here do come
Our hopes and goals and smiles and screams.

But I have been dreaming now a dream for long
It seems to me  like a thread without end.
I toss and turn and shoo it in sleep,
But it goes nowhere at all, my friend.

Tell me why you spun dreams so eternal
Why for us humans you did not care?
Our capacity to hold untold is controlled
We can only bear too much of despair.

O people of Dreamsville! You say dreams breed here
Why can’t you find for me a closure to this nightmare?”

Hearing his plea a woman from our town
Stepped forward, smiled, and began to speak:
“Dreams, my man, are portals to great truths
They surely aren’t much for those who are weak!”

“When we send you a dream, it is for you to complete
Interpret correct or not, but to follow its lead
When you see a dream that seems everlasting
Go ahead and nurture it with struggle’s feed.”

—

It’s almost 4 a.m here. It took me an hour to write this one but it’s important to me because I thought I could never write a ballad*. It’s not perfect but it’s a try, and it was FUN creating this whole thing. It is in response to our poetry challenge 201: Neighborhood, Ballad, Assonance for which we were supposed to write anything related to a “neighborhood” or sense of it, as a ballad like it was done in the formative years.

* ballads are dramatic, emotionally-charged poems that tell a story, often about bigger-than-life characters and situations, and their rhyme scheme is a-b-c-b.