Anatomy of a Child's Dream

I was ten years old and under my skin a galaxy was growing.

My mother called me from the window of the gray apartment block,

and I counted the veins on the back of my hand

like rivers running

toward a heart as large as all of Bucharest.

In the biology textbook,

the drawing of a cell

looked like the map of my neighborhood:

the nucleus was the square,

the membrane was the iron fence

I crossed every afternoon

into the other world,

the one behind the apartment blocks,

where rusted sheds hid

insects the size of a palm,

with wings of translucent paper

through which you could see,

as through stained glass,

childhood flowing through me.

At night,

my brain opened like an old book,

and in it someone wrote,

in letters of chalk,

the story of a little girl

who dreamed

a sky full of butterflies

with wingbeats the size of a breath.

And what else can a little girl dream

but to carry

in the pocket of her dress

a small planet,

twin to her own heart?

But to walk barefoot

across the roof of the world

and be afraid

of neither the dark

nor the years

entering her life

like the last trains into a station?

She dreamed her bones were turning to glass

and through them passed

all the evening light,

just as,

in every lit window,

another child dreamed the same dream,

and every window was an eye

through which the same light

looked back at her,

the same little girl,

the same galaxy

growing, growing

beneath the same thin skin.

And one day

the galaxy stopped growing.

The little girl woke up a woman.

Only the anatomy had changed.

The dream

still had the same heart.

©Corina Junghiatu