I Have A Dream

I Have a Dream

I have a dream of a child who knows

the name of the tree outside her window.

Not oak, not ash - but this oak,

the one whose bark holds the scar

of the August storm, whose leaves speak

in the particular grammar of wind

that crosses the moor at dusk.

She learns the words our grandmothers knew - 

bulrush, kingfisher, bramble - 

words vanishing like breath on winter glass.

Her tongue shapes syllables that summon:

willowherb, meadowsweet, goldfinch,

each word a doorway opening

to the parliament of all living things.

In her dictionary, cloud means

cumulus gathering storm-promise,

not data drifting through fiber-optic veins.

Web holds dewdrops and spider-silk,

Tweet belongs to wrens at dawn,

Stream carries mayflies, not videos.

She is fluent in the first language - 

the language of foxes printing bright paragraphs 

across dawn’s crumpled field, 

pausing at the margins to edit silence, 

with a bristle-burst of paws - 

where trees lean in, keen to annotate 

the wind with winter’s run-on thoughts. 

Watch her small hands trace bark-scripture,

reading the raised text of seasons:

drought-rings, flood-marks, the calligraphy

of beetles beneath the surface.

She translates wind-whispers,

deciphers the syntax of root and stone.

This child is archaeologist

of our severed naming,

gathering the scattered vocabulary

of relationship, restoring

the grammar we forgot

when we moved inside,

when we traded songs for screens.

She rebuilds the bridge of words

between world and wonder,

teaching her own children

to speak the dialect of seasons,

to pronounce the proper names

of home.  

Lucas