a poem by robert hilles

Dream

A boy made an appointment with God and waited for him in a church. After a few hours he knew that God wasn't coming and he learned for the first time that a god must never reveal himself even to the faithful. At first, the boy was hurt by this and stopped reading his Bible and stopped going to church. He began to have strange dreams at night of walking through the bush with a pack of wolves. In his one hand he carried the tail of a deer and in the other a rifle. Even though he walked on two feet and carried a rifle he knew that he was a wolf and that the leader of the pack was his father. In a clearing they found a vast lake and on the far shore stood an enormous moose. As he aimed his rifle his father spoke in his wolf voice saying: "You cannot shoot that moose because he is all that is left of a once powerful God. Instead you must climb onto his back and whisper into his ear the cries your mother made when you were born. Then he will recognize that you are his grandson." The boy did not listen to his father and shot the moose instead in an instant the lake was filled with blood. The wolves all fled and he was left to drown in the blood. Sometimes he wakes before he pulls the trigger other times he wakes as he tries to swim in all that blood. Each time he wakes he knows that God is trying to tell him something with that dream but he is too simple to really understand. Instead he goes back to church knowing that later a different dream will come.

Hilles, Robert. "Dream" Cantos From a Small Room. Don Mills, Ontario: Wolsac and Wynn Publishers, Inc., 1993.