.The Harvest of Dreams

by David Anthony Sam


​He dreams threadbare clothes
woven with sand and stagnant water,
dyed with dried tears and empty skies,
and laced with the skeletons of desert birds.
 
His cloth is faded with echoes of colors
from his longing and those dead words
he hears singing on scratched records
he has salvaged from his past.
 
Morning jolts the fabric of false warmth,
chills his windows with frosted hope.
He rouses into the alien knowledge
of living neither past nor present.
 
Waking harvests echoes of beggars’ cries
and wails of the muezzins, and images
from barren olive groves and vineyards
empty of any fruit, bleak of any leaf.
 
No hands can loom such bitter dreams,
no tongues weave words for such longing.