Yesterday was our artist’s gathering, C.cada. Every afternoon the artists meet together to do a group project or exercise.

In yesterday’s exercise we were given a picture of a “Blob” It looked to me kind of like an ice cream cone with eyes.

Our instructions were to use any art form we wanted to create a piece of art inspired by “the blob”. Our only boundary was that the work had to speak to some spiritual reality.

The blob itself was sort of comical. At first I thought I would have to write something light and funny. Then I got thinking about the word amorphous. It took me back to the root Morph and then to Morpheus the Greek God of dreams. In Medieval Lit Morpheus is depicted as a supernatural being who wears a coat, half white and half black. He stands before two gates, one of horn and one of ivory. One gate leads to false dreams and the other leads to true dreams. From these thoughts came the following.

Morpheus

by JE Lillie

At the gates of horn and ivory

King Friday’s court, Big Bird’s nest

Iran, Iraq and Israel 

All play their best.

The boundary between fairy tale

And fairly true lies blurred.

Subterfuge is diction.

Awake is falsehood.

Asleep is just life’s dream.

It’s in the place between,

When nighttime shudders me off in cold embrace

Or grace of sunrises kiss my temples,

Then for moments

Waking, sleeping, amorphous

Morpheus becomes

The pie-bald singer of reverie

There I hear the truth

And know the lies.