Yesterday morning I woke with the strong urge to write something, which I titled “I Have a Dream.” That’s the way it often is with me – my muse wakes me early, sometimes well before sunrise, and commands, “Write this down…” So I did as I normally obediently do, I wrote.

This “I Have a Dream” piece turned out to be pure fiction, 300-plus words of vivid imagination, about two buddies, Bibi and Donny, locked in a cage and given only one slice each of Wonder Bread each day, until they almost melt away. It felt so good to write it, to imagine this scene in detail – the sights and sounds and smells of it all. “There!” part of me hooted. “See?! See how it feels?!”

But another part of me doubted I could use this piece in any practical way. As a WOW blogpost? Ummm…I didn’t think so. So I ran it past my dear friend Maureen, and she agreed. “Nope.” Too sharp, too biting, too harsh. Doesn’t fit with the rest of my oeuvre, she said. She was right. I shelved “I Have a Dream.”

Throughout my writing career I’ve tried my best to follow Emily Dickinson’s strong advice to “Tell all the truth, but tell it slant. Success in circuit lies,” Emily wrote. That poem, which is chiseled in stone on one wall of my brain, goes on:

Too bright for our infirm delight 

the truth’s superb surprise.

As lightning to the children eased 

with explanation kind,

the truth must dazzle gradually 

or every man be blind.

Translated into the vernacular: Don’t bash your readers over the head, because that will only backfire. Truth must be served up “gradually,” in bite-size pieces, if it’s to be digested at all. Okay, so this has been my approach. At least up until now.

But, given the givens in the news these days, it’s so tempting to scream at the top of one’s lungs: STOP! STOP THIS CRUELTY! STOP IT NOW!!!  This “I Have a Dream” piece turned out to be as subtle and nuanced as a scream. And that, alas, won’t do. Nobody wants to be screamed at, even in print. It’s too easy to press delete.

Somehow, though, in the back of my mind, I had a dream that my ugly, smelly, fictional scene might shake some influential readers into the realization that this just cannot go on another minute. That these two powerful men must be somehow made to see and feel the effects of what they’re doing and then DO what only they can do to stop the unspeakable inhumanity – immediately.

I dreamed my words would make a difference, that above all the cacophony of the news media and the horrors of the on-the-ground videos of starving children, my 300-plus words would break through.

Ha! Dream, dream, dream….

That particular dream is now in the past tense: I HAD a dream. What is one voice? A droplet in the ocean. What’s needed, I think, is a choir – a huge, worldwide tabernacle choir – of voices raised in loud but harmonious protest. It’s beginning to happen, which is heartening. Dreaming is fine; action is better. I think even Emily Dickinson might agree.