The Strangest Dream

 -- By Tom Phillips 

 Picasso: Guernica

Vaccinated at last, on the eve of Easter I flew masked across America, not looking out the window, not talking to my neighbor, and arrived in Seattle to meet our new granddaughter, already nine months old.  My sleeping meds disappeared enroute, probably somewhere "in security." I went to bed, prepared for the worst.  And I dreamed:  

Forty years, forty years.  The phrase kept echoing in my head, an anvil chorus, an indictment, a sentence imposed by a merciless court.  There was music, a vicious descending line that came down like a hammer, repeat, repeat.  And I saw men taking sledgehammers to a nursery, to the place where their children play, bringing down their hammerheads to pulverize everything, to turn it into trash, shards, the ruins of a civilization.  

I awoke in horror. Trained to see people in dreams as fragments of myself, I thought -- can this be?  My meds were repressing a wrecker of all I supposedly love? 

But no, most of me was a bystander, one who watched for forty years as men took sledgehammers to a civilization -- destroying the world that had been a-building, the world meant for their children and grandchildren.  

I had dreamed the Reagan Revolution.   

The stockman, the bursar, began with a blast ---"No one's entitled to anything!"  

Money cried --- God Bless the Child!

A burning Bush stormed the desert -- read my lips, read my lips!  With a giant sucking sound, it was consumed by a clown.  H. Ross Pierrot said -- I told you so.   

In came Billary, a two-faced monster. Not asking, not telling, ending "welfare as we know it," defending, defining, defiling marriage as we knew it, signing a bill for bankers to do it.  The Bill came due.  

An archfiend had been laden with a plan to attack America.  It worked better than he dreamed.  

Another Bush took arms against a sea of troubles, an Axis of Evil with heads in three directions.  Mission unaccomplished, another Bush consumed.  Exit Axis, rising seas.  

Enter Mr. Noh Drama, with "greatness thrust upon him."  He purred, he demurred.  Single mothers took third jobs, fathers sere hounded to Honduras. The archfiend was assassinated and thrown into the sea.   

At last came the Beast, slouching through Bethlehem, down the Capitol steps. Four years later, "the carnage ends here." 

In comes an old man, been Biden his time. Joe and Jill run up the Hill to fetch a pail of oughta.  

"So happy just to be alive, underneath this sky of blue/ On this new morning, with you."   

Stella Justice Burke & me 

- Copyright 2021 by Tom Phillips