Mourning, I dreamt

of endless azure,

a sky so deep

we soon believed

in the embrace

of marble Gods. 

And the trees

who vaunted to me

their verdant riches,

they saw so far—

too firm and profuse

to profit from.

And the grasses

were shipless seas

that gently swayed 

with their whispers,

all in an ancient cant

we never did speak.  

For the warring Greeks,

with their Olympic couplets,

Utopia was doubly defined:

Eutopos—the good place,

and Outopos—the place

that cannot be. 

As for me, I

noticed at once

that unnatural

hush.

And when I woke,

wind. 

Tyler Vaughn Hayes is a poet and essayist in the midst of his MFA at Western Kentucky University and an internship with Amherst’s The Common. His words have been published in The Ponder Review, Thimble Magazine, and many others.

Image: Clouds with azure blue sky – panoramio by Sue Allen under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 license.