Aquifer

I dreamt of dreaming,
my thirst for waking
unquenched,

blind and out of sight,
where stone walls ached,
cold and dead as night.

Behind closed eyes
nightfall took ownership
of my soul’s remains

till sleep curdled,
till sleep precipitated
the solids of daylight

and I lay on a boulder bed
where sea-beaches
sloped beneath the tide,

where incoming dusk
rolled its clouds
in waves,

where sea-waves
ran sand-dark
over ocean black.

My eyes stared up
at a horizon of light,
with no hope of sunrise,

trapped like groundwater,
looking up from a well
to a circle of sky.

© BH, 2022

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I rediscovered this while clearing out early versions of poems. This had been edited down into a poem called ‘Dreamt of Water’ back in 2022. While there’s some cross-over in word and phrase, there’s a different feeling to it. I’ve edited it to preserve that but here it is. As they say - compare and contrast…