I am not their wildest dreams

I am not their wildest dreams

Kathryn H. Ross

Special Feature with Christianity Today
for Black History Month

I don’t think my ancestors dreamt
of sleeping in ‘til noon on a Monday
or of student debt and credit cards,
of a working car and just enough
cash to fill the tank. I don’t think
they dreamt of a small apartment in
the city with monstera on the windowsill,
of cats sleeping lazily in dappled sunspots
sprinkled across hardwood floors.

How could they when they were dreaming of
nights of sleep without waking, of safety and
simple things like peace and goodness and
tomorrow?

How could they when they were dreaming of
rest and kind words, of soft hands, of cruelty
withering like chaff in the wind?

How could they when they were dreaming of
Jesus leaning down and parting the rows of
cotton like a million frothing seas,
of being led to freedom, even freedom
through a wasteland?

How could they when they were dreaming of
holding their children and their mothers and
their fathers and their siblings and
their friends and their lovers and never
being forced to let go?

How could they when they were dreaming of
the man on the cross stretched wide, bloody
and beaten and broken because he looked
just like them?

I think their wild dreams were of sitting
beneath the trees; of cool water on hot days,
of shade from the sun, of leaving Pharoah’s
land, of going home, born across the waters
and the sky cradled in God’s palms.

I am not a wild dream;
I am Paul’s words
in that letter:

Exceedingly abundantly
above; more and mercifully
mundane.

I am everything they
couldn’t think of, everything
they never knew to want.
I am wrought from
weary prayers answered
in my living, so simple and
so small.

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Kathryn H. Ross
Writer & Poet

Kathryn is a SoCal-based writer. She is the author of Black Was Not A Label (PRONTO, 2019; Red Hen Press 2022), a collection of essays and poetry, and Count It All Loss (GoldScriptCo, 2021), a poetry chapbook. Learn more about her and read her other works at speakthewritelanguage.com.

Photography by Alexandra Leru