Waxing Poetic: The Dream by Lola Ridge

 

     Lola Ridge (1873 -1941) was born in  Dublin, grew up in New Zealand and Australia, and moved to the U. S. in 1907.  She was an anarchist poet of the early modernist period.

 

The Dream

I have a dream
to fill the golden sheath
of a remembered day....
(Air
heavy and massed and blue
as the vapor of opium...
domes
fired in sulphurous mist...
sea
quiescent as a gray seal...
and the emerging sun
spurting up gold
over Sydney, smoke-pale, rising out of the bay....)
But the day is an up-turned cup
and its sun a junk of red iron
guttering in sluggish-green water --
where shall I pour my dream?