A Dream of You

black ink, by zoe blue

A Dream of You

a poem by Vesna

You truly stop to smell the roses
You notice the dew on the leaves
You can read from the bark on the trees
Nature’s little secrets open to play for you
Like the vintage musical boxes

Your step is light
Even if your coat looks heavy
You are different
Distant, attractive yet unattainable
Like a sailing ship at the horizon

Here, on the other side of the things
Where the dreams gather to rest
I met a Dream of You
Beautiful like the clef and the notes
Awaiting the One to make music with

notes from zoe:

So, I was caught by the light step despite the heavy coat, and the ship in the distance... and while I was thinking about composition, I found the stories of St. Zita and St. Vincent, whose are both honored at the Basilica of San Frediano in Lucca. St. Zita was a maid, and she was taking bread from the house of her wealthy employers to feed the poor. Someone told on her, and her employers confronted her, telling her to open her coat and show them what she was carrying. Disappointed and ashamed, she slowly opened her coat, and piles of daffodils fell out, but no bread. She is, like St. Fevronia, one who was able to overwhelm the violence of others by nothing more than their own radiance; as a result she went from a simple harassed maid to respected leader of the house despite several difficulties.

After St. Vincent was martyred, a flock of ravens protected his body from the vultures until others could come retrieve it and give it a proper burial, which they did at what is now called Cape St. Vincent, where the ravens continued their guard over his shrine to such a visible extent that Muslim geographer Al-Idrisi (1099-1165) gave the shrine its name Kanisah al-Ghurab (Church of the Raven). In this particular drawing, I didn’t focus on the birds being ravens because I wanted them to be smaller, but it is interesting to note that ravens have a special place in many traditions as mediators between life and death; in Sweden they can be considered the ghosts of murder victims, and in some areas of far-east Russia, Kutkh, a trickster, is a raven who creates himself from an old fur coat.

The pairing gave me a heavy coat which could disappear from both ends.