Arizona Dreaming

Poems and Thoughts from the Anxious Poet

Oracle - Arizona

Having finished the series on my trip to the Midwest of the USA I thought this would be a good place to post poems and thoughts. I have a podcast The Anxious Poet's Podcast looking at Poetry, Anxiety and Vulnerability and this Substack seems a nice companion piece to that work, only in written form. Hope it is helpful and that readers like it.

Arizona Dreaming
The fire crackles,
the bird’s throats warm up,
the song begins,
taken up by one species
after another,
then the coyotes break out, 
cackling and carousing. 
One lonely car horn
sounds in the distance,
perhaps a man
leaving for his work. 
Then the sun,
as if for the first time,
slips over the mountains, 
changing the sky from pitch blue 
to pink then fleeting gold, 
giving way to full azure.
And the dream slips between
the mesquite and sage.
Listen to
the song,
the crackles,
the cackling,
all finding their way to you, 
here, now.
You are entering
the council of nature, 
surrounding you,
noticing you,
because you are listening. 

Can you let the dream 
arrest you,
take your mind captive, 
and release your yearning? 
Can you take
the hand of the gathering
wind and stand up
into the replete fullness
that is your ancestral inheritance? 
Because the dream that
has come to you
will need your full attention
if you are to be
its embodiment in the world.
It is a word you could
be the utterance of,
an authority that flows from this fire,
a song to sing like these birds
and coyotes,
full throated and unique.
Can you trust
that this breath from the
dreamworld could be
the outlier
of the new story
that you tell about yourself?

To listen to the author read this poem click below

In April 2017 I went to Oracle in Arizona for a leadership retreat with an organisation called Illuman. The group came out of the men’s work I had been involved with since 2002 - largely inspired by the Franciscan priest Richard Rohr. Each year those of us in Leadership would meet at the Triangle Y Ranch in the very aptly named town of Oracle. A couple of hours outside of Phoenix it had a series of bunkhouses with a nice conference room all looking out over Mount Lemmon and the Butterfly Peaks. One morning we decided to have a Dream Council. That meant getting up as the dawn light tinged the horizon and making a fire in the little amphitheatre on property. Sitting in silence as the sun rose and then sharing any dreams that stemmed from the night’s sleep we had just left.

This poem came to me as we sat and then I worked on it when I returned to the UK. It is available in my third collection ‘A Night Sea Journey’ for sale here. Buy the Book .