The Slow Awakening
Chris Dahl
In that other world
I parked the car on Spring Meadow Road
in the middle of fields run rampant,
and turned at the small stream
where it flowed its path
into shade. Warmth, the fluting
of birds, an idyll.
Further down, I could see my son
in a different iteration, an alternate
child holding the collar of our long-gone dog,
red-gold giant whom seven-year-old boys
sometimes confused with a lion.
Further, beyond them, waited my husband
also in another, younger, iteration.
But this was a world
where shifts occurred in an instant.
Now, no summer succor but
a foreign city, where I desperately
searched for all that had disappeared.
A gone world, a never-happened world.
Remember the meadow was full of daisies
just like today. And the dog’s coat
gleamed copper. How alive
it all was. How extraordinary
that I took it for granted.
About the Author
Chris Dahl hopes to cup a handful of murky pond-water and reveal another world half-hidden in this one. Her book, Not Now but Soon, won Concrete Wolf's 2024 Louis Award. Mrs. Dahl in the Season of cub Scouts, a chapbook, won Still Waters Press' "Women's Words" competition. Her poems have been placed in a wide variety of journals--recently in Kestrel and Cirque--and she has had poems nominated both for Best of the Internet and Pushcart Prizes. A board member of the Olympia Poetry Network, she edits their monthly newsletter, and shares her life with her husband and a tuxedo cat once named Minnow, but now called Sylvie.