<http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/poetry/ 2007/09/17/070917po_poem_mitchell>
Poetry Bad Dreams Are Good
by Joni Mitchell
September 17, 2007
The cats are in the flower beds A red hawk rides the sky I guess I should be happy Just to be alive But We have poisoned everything And oblivious to it all The cell-phone zombies babble Through the shopping malls While condors fall from Indian skies Whales beach and die in sand Bad Dreams are good In the Great Plan
And you cannot be trusted Do you even know you are lying? It’s dangerous to kid yourself You go deaf, dumb, and blind You take with such entitlement You give bad attitude You have No grace No empathy No gratitude You have no sense of consequence Oh, my head is in my hands Bad Dreams are good In the Great Plan
Before that altering apple We were one with everything No sense of self and other No self-consciousness But now we have to grapple With this man-made world backfiring Keeping one eye on our brother’s deadly selfishness
Everyone’s a victim here Nobody’s hands are clean There’s so very little left of wild Eden Earth So near the jaws of our machines We live in these electric scabs These lesions once were lakes We don’t know how to shoulder blame Or learn from past mistakes So who will come to save the day? Mighty Mouse. . . ? Superman. . . ? Bad Dreams are good In the Great Plan
In the dark A shining ray I heard a three-year-old boy say Bad Dreams are good In the Great Plan