From a giant’s dream

Star-bejeweled silhouettes of acorn-crowned oaks
Somnolent Spanish-moss, billowing in gentle breeze
The child Giant’s sleeping visions:

Forming garden furrows,
As fingers glide through water
Sowing lives of plenty,
As sand flows through hourglass

We are the emergent dream of a child
Fresh from the edge of an unblinking tear
Cradled in a sleeping Mountain’s closed eyes

Post Script

This poem followed the same 2016 journey through the Cohutta and Big Frog Wilderness Areas. The trip had ended, but the scale and presence of the landscape continued working within me.

Here the mountain does not awaken. It sleeps. Within its closed eyes, a child giant dreams of using his strength benevolently: forming garden furrows and sowing lives of plenty. Humanity emerges within that dream, “fresh from the edge of an unblinking tear,” something tender, precarious, and newly imagined.

As children, we dream of the benevolent giants we might become. The poem reverses that familiar scale. Even the giant remains a child, and even that child is held within something larger. We are dreams within a dream, cradled by the landscape that first appeared to be beneath our feet.

Read beside Big Frog Mountain’s rebirth, the two poems form a small cycle. In one, the mountain comes alive. In the other, all life emerges within the sleeping mountain.

Image credit: Joseph E. Patterson, photographed during the 2016 Cohutta–Big Frog Wilderness backpacking trip.