Imagine

I wrote this poem last October in a writing salon with Patrice Vecchione at Gabriella Café in Santa Cruz, where her art show Imagination Migration was on display, a flock of hand-colored birds carrying flowers, maps and pencils in their beaks. I didn’t guess then how much I would need imagination to move into my next chapter, our next chapter.

For me, today is a day for remembering the courage and wisdom of Martin Luther King, Jr. “We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline,” he admonished in his “I Have a Dream” speech. “We must not allow our creative protests to degenerate into physical violence.” Although he was talking specifically about civil rights for black Americans, his sagacity transcends the March on Washington in 1963. Dignity, discipline, and nonviolence are his guidelines, and just as important, “We cannot walk alone.”

Today I’m also remembering the four freedoms Franklin Delano Roosevelt articulated in his State of the Union address on January 6, 1941: the freedom of speech, the freedom of worship, the freedom from want, and the freedom from fear. Today I call on our collective creative energy to imagine a future of freedom and justice for all. 

Imagination

I swallow sunlight with each persimmon

bite, and juicy sweetness quenches 

fear, feeds in me the flame 

that wants to burn

like the persimmon did 

when it plumped into roundness

and swam into its deepening orange.

Oh, that fire wants to burn bright. 

Something greater than me kindled

my flame, the same something

that coaxes birds into flight

and taught the persimmon to long

for orange. I swallow sunlight,

and birds fly through my pen

onto the page. They are cooing

and warbling, hooting and squawking.

They love this page, and it loves

them back, so fiercely it gives 

up its claim to gravity, and really

it turns out there’s no defiance

quite like flight.

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*Drawing courtesy of Sarojani Rohan