Summer Poetry Challenge: Week 8

The lullaby was a good choice for last week. Light, soft, and rhythmic, easy to get down over vacation. This week's poem:

Hold Fast Your Dreams by Louise Driscoll

Hold fast your dreams!
Within your heart
Keep one still, secret spot
Where dreams may go,
And, sheltered so,
May thrive and grow
Where doubt and fear are not.
O keep a place apart,
Within your heart,
For little dreams to go!

Think still of lovely things that are not true.
Let wish and magic work at will in you.
Be sometimes blind to sorrow. Make believe!
Forget the calm that lies
In disillusioned eyes.
Though we all know that we must die,
Yes you and I
May walk like gods and be
Even now at home in immortality.

We see so many ugly things—
Deceits and wrongs and quarrelings;
We know, alas! we know
How quickly fade
The color in the west,
The bloom upon the flower,
The bloom upon the breast
And youth's blind hour.
Yet keep within your heart
A place apart
Where little dreams may go,
May thrive and grow.
Hold fast—hold fast your dreams!

Waiting this long for publication (close to 3 years since my first book was accepted) brings with it a lot of different emotions. Impatience, anticipation, self-doubt, confidence, excitement, questioning reality, hope, facing looks of doubt in the eyes of others as time goes on, clinging to words of encouragement. I'm still holding fast--with both hands.