Annette and the Dreams

- Lara Stokes -

 
It comes like a memory:

I am present and remembering,

looking at the moment while inside.’

 

About this family gift to our women

she warned me once,

and Auntie, I have seen ghosts,

I have woken stricken from dreams

and found their urgencies true.

‘Keep it close,’ she told me,

‘This is no mercy but a grace.’

 

In childhood she predicted fires,

warned the family out

then dreamed again, of arson.

In dreams she speaks to strangers,

had tea once with a grandma of a friend.

They’d never met - she knew the house,

the teacups and which leg had the pain.

She told this to her friend who wept;

they had just found the grandma dead.

 

She has a premonition for me.

Recently she smiled and said

‘I don’t want to put anything

into your head. But I am looking down this moment,

and it is bigger than you think.’ Again, she smiled 

significantly, nodding to my boy across the room

In my dreaming, I believed.