Lavender Dreams

My passport sits collecting dusts, cries to learn something new, asks to be read but all I see is memories not had. I lay in my room lavender from my mother’s garden dried and held in a glass vase on my bedside next to my journal while my oil diffuser slowly envelopes my entire room in lavender. I lay still while the moon and the lavender sing silent lullabies to my purple heart;

I dream in Paris raindrops

A gentle patter of petals

Lavender fields of dreams

An exchange of heart beats and reason

My memories belong to Paris

Under sunshine that breaks through clouds

Reclaiming all the tears from broken lovers

My pain transcends

This earth has been watered by me enough in past lives

Paris knows this well

Lavender beds and quiet dreams

Over cobbled streets and secret smiles

Paris marries me away to Istanbul

Another exchange of dreams and needs

Istanbul holds me the way a child holds a dandelion

Asking what do you mean this is nothing

Istanbul marinates my pain

Tries to make it rise, elevate out of me

Onto blank paper

Trying to makes a clean slate out of me

I hold Istanbul the way a child holds a mother

Istanbul blows gentle kisses

And I find myself in the air again

I land in Rome

Rome laughs at me

Says I have never loved yet

Leans into me in the piazza

private moments held in public

Asks me if I ever thought of how loud an empty theatre can yell

How what’s left still speaks for what’s not

Rome tells me Barcelona is calling

And I answer

Barcelona is so loud

Even the birds shout hello, the wind a welcomed kiss

I sit on the beach, under umbrella

Barcelona wonders why a girl with so many stories is so quiet

In the evening the sound goes for rest and leaves me and my notebook

I rewrite an old story

The city awakes disappointed

Blames itself, thinks the birds to loud, the wind to fast and the waves to predictable

I look in the mirror

Barcelona in attempt at apology appoints Vienna

Warns this city of me

Vienna paints the whole sky purple for me

Picture perfect display of what god can do

It is in Vienna that I pray again

I hear Mozart in children's laughter

Beethoven echoed in the sound that comes out of restaurants

Vienna teaches me harmony

My two left feet learning how to walk again

I dare to dance in the warm rain

I cry with the earth and I am smiling

I kiss Vienna goodbye

Vienna and its purple sky never asks why

I wake up on in Mombasa

I hold Mombasa the way I pray my mother did

Mombasa smells both of loss and promise

But more than that it smells of home

Mombasa asks me to stay forever,

reminds me what happened last time

Mombasa brings me purple flowers

Stretches smiles and days into weeks

Mombasa tries to reclaim me as much as I try reclaim it

When I leave… Mombasa holds me the way a mother holds a child

So scared and so proud to be able to let go

kisses my forehead and patting my dandelion spine

We cry in unison

Toronto welcomes me

With its own sort of dandelion pride

Asks politely of what I have seen

I speak of the purple everything, the flowers the skies

I speak of the noise and the quiet, how they tried to outdo each other

I speak of the laughter

I brought home an empty journal

Along with the noise

My voice a whole field of lavender

A bouquet of dandelions

Public piazza humming

a dance in warm rain

memories filled with both loss and promise

I fill my journal

Even with pen I am dancing

Willing into life purple dreams

I hold poetry the way a child holds a dandelion

Knowing the beauty in its reach

From Paris to Mombasa to Toronto

What is a purple sky but poetry suspended

And warm rain except for alliteration

And so we dream and we write even with our eyes open

The beauty in poetry is the whole world is a metaphor away

Unlocked for me with lavender dreams

Poetry is home and the earth is listening

on purple fields and under purple skies

showing you why

&

willing you to try