The Garden of Dreams

 

As silver creeps into

The amber of our autumn years,

We often wonder, look back,

At the long tendrils

Of dreams that we had woven

When we were blessed

With time and will and hope

 

But as we step into

The throes of wakefulness

These wispy dreams of yesterday

Shred away like stray clouds

Or dissolve

In a moment’s taste

Of sugary candy floss

 

And we realise

The tendrils needed more -

Those walls of support,

Coir sticks of jutting luck,

A trellis of dangling fatefulness

And lots of garden smiles

Beyond brooding days

 

In the last fading sun though

Somehow, all seems awash

With a tinge

Of abstract gold

And we see beyond

The potted plants of garden sweat

The planter boxes of our times

 

We see all those saplings

Dispersed with time

Arriving, thriving, unexpectedly

Creepers, climbers, ramblers all

A pair of nesting doves

Hovering bees, the lacewings

Who called this, their homes of small

 

Sometimes, they came as gifts

A succulent here

A night queen there,

Many more that came and went

Who will diarise them?

Easy to forget, the garden

Had a life of its own

 

And then, we realise

As much though, many of

Our dreamy saplings

Were left ungrown

Many more came

Many more left

The busy gardener rostered them not

 

When the time comes

The garden alone cannot be measured

Rather, the gardener has to be gauged

In him lives the universe

That grows and swirls

With wonder blooms and weeds

Throbbing with life, the essence of dreams…

30th October, 2025