When The Tide Comes to Take Us
I fall asleep and dream of a beach town with docks covered in cheerful flags, bustling tourists, smiling vendors selling fruit and jewelry. In the distance, an ocean roiling with anger bubbles to a frenzy, inching closer and closer, unbeknownst to the happy faces.
You see, even in slumber, we know that terror can lurk just moments from bliss.
Suddenly, the waves arrive like a monster, tossing people into its belly, never to be seen again, while sparing others who run away into the distance, escaping certain death.
I cling to a dock post, yelling to a small boy to hold on with me. He does not know how, or he is too afraid, or there is nothing to cling to, I don't know, it's like he's in a different country, right next to me.
The turbulence takes who it takes, but this is not to say that there is no choice.
When I look again, the boy is gone.
When I awaken, I am angry at my dream-self for clinging to a dock post, while a little boy stands helpless facing a raging sea.
The sea of my dreams is not so different from the land of my wakefulness, where it is possible for me to be lying in bed asleep and dreaming, while elsewhere, bombs fall into the homes of the dreaming. Where my own child is tucked safely in her bed, and another child trembles. Where it is possible for you or I to cling desperately to our one bedroom apartment, our rattling sedan, our aging mattress, while right next to us, in another country, someone cannot find a single, solid thing to cling to.
You have to know that we are all that dream-self.
We are all that little boy.
We are all the raging sea.
I say this to tell you that there is a world in which we can choose to hold our hands out to each other when the tide comes to take us.
Maybe there's already a world in which we do, somewhere in our minds.
I say this because you have to know that if one of us is drowning,
we are all drowning.
Mela Blust is an award-nominated poet whose works have appeared in various literary journals and magazines. Her debut poetry collection, Skeleton Parade, was published with Apep Publications, and her most recent full length collection, Men and Their Flowers, has just been released by Blue Horse Press Press, and is available on Amazon now. Mela is a contributing editor for Barren Magazine and can be followed at https://twitter.com/melablust.