The Poetry of Dreams (1) The Prelude

The Portal of Thought - Doors, by Sylvia Pekarek

I live inside this painting of a dream.
I live its metaphors for vibrancy,
As far away from quite the usual stream
Of all that is the left-brain tyranny.
For much of life I live is in this red –
The raw of breath and pulse, of move and still,
Of try to look away, because the dread
Is never so removed from where I will
Come face-to-face with it for sure in time.
For Hamlet came to life, like night to dawn,
When providence exposed the uncle’s crime
And then the act to which it spurred him on.
There is a prompting for the dream I’m in.
There is a readiness now to begin.

The Poetry of Dreams (Part 1) - The Prelude © Ron Villejo

The Prelude captures my first reactions on seeing Sylvia’s painting. It took a little longer than usual for me to get started with this poem, as I was sorting out what it meant for me to ‘live in the red’ – one metaphor I use to represent non-rational thinking (i.e., right-brain thinking). This is where, I believe, life can be lived vibrantly. This is where I live.

The form is a classic Shakespearean sonnet – its rhyme scheme, iambic pentameter, and progression. The first line is a ‘take off’ from the first line of the Michael Franks’ song A Walk in the Rain – “I lived in a painting by Renoir.”