In a dream I meet
my dead friend. He has,
I know, gone long and far,
and yet he is the same
for the dead are changeless.
They grow no older.
It is I who have changed,
grown strange to what I was.
Yet I, the changed one,
ask: ‘How you been?’
He grins and looks at me.
‘I been eating peaches
off some mighty fine trees.’
*A poem from writer, farmer, activist and poet Wendell Berry. It has been ages since I dreamt about my missing friends – one of whom has been dead since 1993. Yet the times they have appeared to me in dreams are as if these dreams were yesterday, so vivid are they in my mind. Ditto the weeping way I woke from those dreams, knowing they were gone, lost to me, lost to the world, even if every moment of the dream led me to believe they were full of breath, real, and visiting me. I hope they are eating peaches – or whatever they loved – in the universe of dreams. For more on Berry, here is a link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wendell_Berry