To Sleep Above the Sky

Modern poetry modern verse contemporary poetry contemporary verse modern poem contemporary poem

“I’m never quite sure my thoughts will take me.  All I can do is follow them.”  ~ Michel de Montaigne

“A thought went up my mind today” ~ Emily Dickinson

“I am a man and nothing human is alien to me.”  ~ the ceiling of Montaigne’s bedroom

« En l’amitié de quoi je parle, elles se mêlent et confondent l’une en l’autre, d’un mélange si universel qu’elles effacent et ne retrouvent plus la couture qui les a jointes. »

“In the friendship of which I speak, souls mingle and blend into one another in so universal a mixture that they erase and no longer find the seam that joined them.”

~ Montaigne

We know how thoughts will go, will zig and zag,

Will leap and disappear.  Another time

They zap with stiffness.  Then the thought will sag

And be forgotten yet again.  Its crime

Is that it grabs us when we fear it most

The way a rapist grips behind unwilling throat,

The way a leopard grabs and brings a ghost

Above savannah grass.  Yet where dreams float

Not all are nightmares.  Sometimes favorite quotes

Are levitating just below us where

We float in sleep and sometimes deepest moats

Protect us as we climb our shining stair.

  An alien who isn’t strange at all

    Creeps into bed and holds us in his thrall.

©  Phillip Whidden

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La Boétie and Montaigne