David Hutto’s work is forthcoming in Brussels Review and Literally Stories and has recently appeared in Mudfish, Cable Street, The Galway Review, and Paterson Literary Review, as well as in Crazyhorse and other magazines. He recently won second place in the Darling Axe First Page Prize for novels, as well as first prizes for short story and poetry in the Northeast Georgia Writers Club contest. His experience as a writer includes a writers’ retreat in Mérida, Mexico in 2024, a residency at the Vermont Studio Center in 2003, and first-place poetry awards from state-wide contests in Alabama and Georgia.
Website: www.davidhutto.com
We lay on our backs a little drunk
looking up at the night sky.
“Look,” someone said. “Bats.”
We watched them,
and the stars beyond them,
and the dreams beyond the stars.
Perhaps most of all
we were looking at the dreams
which seemed so vivid at the time.
In the Greek town of Delphi,
we had climbed out onto the hotel roof
to lie there intoxicated under the sky.
Thousands of years before us,
walking and by small wooden ships
people came here,
to the temple of Apollo,
hoping to learn if their dreams would come true,
wanting to know the future.
As we lay on that roof
beneath the Greek sky,
watching the bats dash and swoop,
we all saw different dreams.
Mine were descended from the Greek alphabet
and the ancient writers.
The man beside me dreamed of medical school.
Beside him lay a woman who dreamed of theater auditions in New York.
Time was rushing toward us
so full of surprises that even Apollo couldn’t predict,
but that evening,
happy with wine,
happy in ignorance,
we lay on the roof
watching bats.
Poetry in this post: © David Hutto
Published with the permission of David Hutto