“Dear Mother, last night I dreamt”

Karen George created “Dear Mother, last night I dreamt” from “The Pomegranate Seeds” in Tanglewood Tales by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1853). Please click here to read.

About the poem and the process of composing it, Karen George writes:

I selected Nathaniel Hawthorne’s story “The Pomegranate Seeds” because I liked the title, and I simply ran my eyes over the pages, pulling out phrases I liked the sound of, or the imagery they suggested—making a list of them. When I had a 6-page list of phrases, I browsed them and circled ones that I liked best, again by sound and the imagery/idea they conjured. Then I began piecing them together to make some kind of sense. A dreamlike poem emerged that reminded me of dreams I’ve been having about my deceased mother since she died in March 2020.

Also by Karen George at Heron Tree: “The Wait,” “Lip of the Well,” “In the Well,” “In Sleep’s Cape,” “Eve Takes to the Air,” “Ars Poetica,” and “Become Like the Sea, A Vessel.”