Dreams of Fire

In the middle of a hot
and breezeless night,

I’m drenched in sweat
and wrestling with the sheet
snaked around my legs.

I’m  running from a heath fire,
purple heather sizzles

into burnt sienna
and birds explode
in showers of feathers,

glowing and spitting
like fanned embers.

A sharp-winged dragon
skims the hummocks,
breathing flames

and licking tussocks
that erupt with rusty

orange butterflies,
incandescent,
flaring and roaring,

igniting dream
after dream.

Kim M. Russell, 21st July 2018

Image result for fire breathing dragons Pinterest
Image found on Pinterest

My response to Imaginary Garden with Real Toads Weekend Challenge: A Little Night Music

Brendan is our host this weekend and he’s asking us to dream. He gives us a historical background to the study and interpretation of dreams and reminds us that artists throughout history have taken constant inspiration from dreams and that poetry is the closest thing in language we have to dreaming. 

Our challenge is to pull pages from our dream-books and view them with the lens of poetry;  to bring poetry and dreaming close together (or show us paradoxically how far apart they still are); to write a poem in the manner of a dream or dream in the manner of a poem.

23 thoughts on “Dreams of Fire”

  1. Yikes. From your comment after the prompt you seem to dream like Kerry — they are drowning — this is certainly a dream from the bestiary, all tooth and fire. It stalks the dreamer, corners the perception. I wonder at the psychic wiring — whether this is biochemical accident or damage — whatever the cause, I think it makes you a very special poet, as your perceptions always have this crisp clarity to them. Do you revise your poems, or do they usually come out this complete? Just wondering.

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    1. Hi Brendan. Thank you for reading so closely. My dreams are always vivid and very realistic. They don’t feel like dreams and they very often result in lines of poems and sometimes complete poems. Pretty much all the poetry I write for prompts hasn’t been revised; I do that later when I’ve gained some distance and objectivity and I’m putting something together for submission. I sometimes take an old poem and rework it for a prompt. Once I get an idea I have to get it down!

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  2. My goodness this is good! I could literally feel the fire and picture the “birds explode in showers of feathers”.. so vivid it felt real! 🔥💕 Powerful writing.

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  3. Very vivid, frightening. You do dream realistic dreams! The dragon can be frightening. The images in this poem, the orange butterflies, the birds bursting into flame, all of these images attest to a realism and detail I do not have in my dreams
    If I had such dreams, I don’t think I would ever go to sleep.

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  7. OH, that is some fiery writing. It’s fierce, it’s tantalizing and all too gripping. There’s something about these drastic imagers that one can not help but be thrilled by them. A dream is such which imperils the boundaries of peace and tragedy, as does your verse.
    -HA

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    1. We have had a warning to stay indoors, it’s so hot here, and we’ve had crop fires, unknown in this region, Our garden remains lush and green at the moment – if that should change, I will be more than worried!

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