Behind the Veil of Dreams
Author's Note

The idea for this poem came to me one night as I was watching a movie with a girlfriend I'd had named Denise. All the lights were out but I could still see her laying on the other end of the L-shaped sectional couch by the light of the TV. I just lay there and watched her from across the room through the whole movie, adoring her beauty and wanting her to notice me staring at her, wanting her to come and kiss me. She did too. All of the sudden her eyes glanced over at me and she just stared at me staring at her. I suppose she somehow read my thoughts because she got up and came over to kiss me. Then she said "I love you," and the rest is poetic history.

I went home the next day and wrote the poem out on a scrap of loose leaf. A rough draft that was pretty good for the first try. Then I rewrote it, refining it as I went until I had everything I wanted to say written in the best possible way I could say it. I gave it to her that night. I can't remember what she thought of it though.

We broke up a few months after that. These things happen. It was for the best I suppose. Later, however I turned the older draft of the poem in to Mr. McKinnon, my English teacher who was always demanding a new poem out of me, and that I go to university some day. He filed it away in his stacks of notes somewhere and I never saw it again until years later when he asked if he could submit it to a poetry journal called "Prairie Fire". It was a nationally published poetry magazine so naturally I agreed. So there it resides forever in "Volume 13, Number 4". My first published poem. The Winnipeg Free Press newspaper even did an article on our publication one weekend. I was very proud. Thanks once again, to Mr. McKinnon.

Kevin Ranville