Saturday, January 31, 2026

translating dream language

 

the oracle of dreams


in the middle of the night my dreams make me face them,

all my unfulfilled hopes and my unrealized fears

worm their way into my dreams,

I often feel like a pilgrim

visiting the oracle at Delphi,

hearing clearly the words and seeing the images given to me

but flummoxed by the ambiguity of the surface meaning,

deep within me I feel the warnings, the charge,

but it's cursed hard to retranslate dream language into what I can know,


I have to blunder through,

to bludgeon the truth

from the metaphors within which I live at night,

so that I can move forward,


I have to trust a translation that seems, at best, approximate,

and, at times, inexplicable.



by Henry H. Walker

January 23, ‘25

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