Sleeping Beauty Revisited

I should like to nap for a hundred years, but unlike Sleeping Beauty, I want that slumber: Ignorant of the cobwebs and the dust, Indifferent to the mice crawling and chewing, Oblivious to the world as time shifts heavily on the shoulders of some immutable God.

I would go into the next century the way an old woman embraces eternity counting her stitches as she knits one eye on the clock, patiently waiting for sleep to silence her, finally.

I would go without protest, no last request of a kiss or a cigarette; I’ll sleep serenely as a doll, porcelain and ageless.

I will awaken on my own, an old woman with new flesh. Reborn, my eyes clear from the wisdom of one hundred years, my hair like a veil around me, my hands unlined I will rise: called from sleep by the mouth of my dreams.

Gustav Klimt's Danae