Poetry and a Day Commemorating Assassination.

I am participating in a “blog hop” today with another post of mine about the remembrance of the assassination of President Kennedy.  I wanted to include this poem, Braided Dreams, that was accepted as one of the poems of the week by Poets Against the War, but it isn’t about Kennedy, not really.  It does allude to Kennedy though, and that is how so much of our Late Boomer lives have been.  Kennedy is part of the infrastructure of our public consciousness.  The world outside us was shaped by this event and our lives were shaped by that world.  We are inseparable.

braided dreams
i dreamt of second planes diverted
of the world powers still suckling from milky towers
of wars ended
but not the one we are fighting
of oil never pumped for the patriarchy
of grassy knolls with gunshots never fired
impossible dreams
of resurrections of camelot
of peace
the mythic moments
real only in the other world
where fact fiction and logical conspiracy
live in balance
where competing realities
agreeably alternate
braid sleepy dreams
into the connecting fibers of companion worlds
a rapid cycling brigadoon
surfacing altantis-like from undepleted oceans
if we all slept at once and dreamt the same dream
would we awaken to a different world
November 17, 2004
N F Hill

Grassy knolls and Camelot.  Our Boomer psyches look over our shoulders looking for unseen gunmen, but we also believe in mythic fairy tales.  I don’t think we can understand Later Born Baby Boomer psychology without taking this fracture, this bifurcation of our sensibilities, into account.