Last night I dreamed,
workers painting my house
Brought all of their children
to work in the morning
With brushes and buckets
of water, to wash and to clean
To scrub and to scour
the faces,
Like paintings on canvas,
That had appeared overnight
on the walls of my house.
Black faces, white faces,
yellow, red and brown
Faces of every hue and tone,
every size and shape,
And the children all the while
washing and scrubbing
But never hurting the faces.
And me, all the while watching
the children hard at work.
And then, in my dream,
the parents and their children
Began to tear down the Wall
surrounding my house.
By the end of the day,
they had torn down every boulder
And every stone, torn down
the ground-swell beneath,
Until nothing remained of my wall
but green grass and brown earth.
And me, all the while watching
the families hard at work
With a growing sense
of contentment
Coming from deep inside.
Gil Hoy is a Boston poet and trial lawyer who studied poetry at Boston University through its Evergreen program. Hoy received a B.A. in Philosophy and Political Science from Boston University, an M.A. in Government from Georgetown University, and a J.D. from the University of Virginia School of Law. He served as a Brookline, Massachusetts Selectman for four terms. Hoy’s poetry has appeared most recently in Chiron Review, Ariel Chart, Social Justice Poetry, Poetry24, Right Hand Pointing/One Sentence Poems, The Penmen Review, I am not a silent poet, TheNewVerse.News and Clark Street Review.