Richard Burns

London

I Dreamed I Slept

From a note by Ivo Andrić

I dreamed I slept, and in that sleep I dreamed,
and from that double dream interior woke
and walked in a closed courtyard. Someone spoke
behind me, and I turned. A dark girl beamed
brown eyes at me. I gazed. 'Just as you seemed
in dream to dream, so by the double stroke
of waking into waking, from this yoke
you've shouldered, may you be redeemed.'

So when I enter my last mortal sleep,
after all dreams have gone, and I am dead,
will then I wake and, doubly waking, keep
some mirror of that garden in my head
and, back inside it, rising from the deep
distress of death, sleepwalk, or wake instead?
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