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.
*Drawing courtesy of Sarojani Rohan
The Kingdom of Enough 