Night loomed dark and dreary,
And in the village, just as eerie,
Men and women, and children, too,
Sleeping without dreaming,
Their dreams too tightly within them teeming,
Had no clue
What the gleaming to them would do.

So what was gleaming, you rightly ask,
And bestow upon me the task of telling.

As was said, the village tacit,
Dream glands flaccid, the air just as placid,
Houses of washed out red and green,
But then in the middle could be heard and seen
A man atop the church roof yelling.

This man, this poet, crazed with rhyme,
Had scaled the church in little time,
Propelled by something oddly novel,
Something that within him grovelled
From his rime to be set free.
At least so it seemed to me.

And he wished to cast his quill aside,
And relentlessly his will abided,
And gleaming fragments of his dreams
Poured out into the slumbering air.
Pieces of some now dead parchment,
These syllables of praise now all went
Slip-sliding into the atmosphere.
But with nothing but his cries to drive them
They would not have stood a chance.
But what was that? Did a breeze advance?

Yes, a breeze his loud appeal had heard
And breezed by, picked up the words
The syllabi, the jumbled mess and breezed on,
But then!
The breeze itself broke free and grew and,
Now a storm commanding some authority,
Frenzied, infected, even, by his poetry,
Screamed in the air, rustled the branches,
Shrieked in every keyhole the village had to offer.
And through every stovepipe did it creep.

And the poet was now silent
And the wind was winding down
And somewhere in the tired town
A man awoke and looked around
As others still lay sound asleep.