The Thing About Mooses...

Well, I have only just discovered that they have furry horns all year round.

It might not be so interesting, other than that mooses are also deemed a nuisance for damaging people's cars whilst cheerfully committing suicide on the road. It is a tragic life, being a moose, something I had not realised before. But still, I have my own problems, only I don't have a nice set of furry horns to go with them.. You see, it is all about the nature of poetry. These times are very unkind to poets, they have been accused of being liars, thieves and plagiarists. But a poet cannot help himself, it is a kind of fundamental flaw, it seems, to dream.. And still worse to commit that dream to any tangible form. You see, a dream is just not real, it is an abstraction on life, purely subjective, purely worthless and of course, perfectly sublime.

What are we about here, but the creation of a beautiful interconnected unreality? What are we doing together here? We are simply dreaming. I have a life lived out in this dream, I touch on the dreams of others, I connect at times..

I'll tell you about something that happened. It is of course absolutely true that what we dream becomes reality, it may not become yours, but it becomes nonetheless. I used to dream about the colours of the sunset, they would pile in on me, overwhelm me, frighten me. But sunsets and sunrises became special.

When I was a child I used to go out in the dawn, searching for mooses in the early morning mist. I never found one, but I looked and looked... And once I came upon a huge mound of earth from a nearby excavation, and took to dreaming, wondering how the dream would look from the top. So one morning, I dragged a brother from his early morning reverie to treck to the mound, in search of the dream, to see the sunrise on the horizon. Children, you will understand, can only ever live for horizons. In the dark we climbed the mound, and waited for those first rays... It was overcast, grey, the dawn struggled into life, without a single sparkling ray, without a horizon. The dream remained a dream as it started to rain. Our hearts sank and no words passed between us as we journeyed home. I'll remember this forever. It formed a lasting baptism for hope, of disappointment.

But of course it was still only a dream I was weaving into the pattern of my life. And so the dream of disappointment became a theme for all my hopes. That is, until I had found enough of the real thing to no longer dream. This morning, looking out on the sunrise through my window, across the rooftops, I had a new dream, which flickered, fairie like, into my soul. There were rays and colours and horizons. And whilst disappointment had found a home in me to replace hope, those rays baptised me anew. I needed to know the taste of disappointment, before I could drink the sweet wine of hope. Hope comes all too easily to a child, as do dreams. But those morning rays were angels returning home, in the light of experience I am again born to a new dream... As disappointment now gives way to hope.

So, all who are here, since we don't have furry horns, let's not be afraid to dream, it is after all, a web of dreams we are weaving...

Richard Ashrowan, Editor The Muse