“Sun Daisy (3)” © onetouch grafix
Solar Heiress, Lunar Bride
by Iris Orpi
Surely you must know that fire. Surely there must stir in you a similar burning, a revolution with the same soul, albeit with different street names to march on, flags to wave and subversive songs to chant. I’m sure somewhere you have also concluded that the stuff you are made of must be bigger than your body, that you are a foundling of rivers and rainstorms, a love child of the worldly
and the celestial.
The crashing waves that had awakened you all those nights in the city were coming from inside your dreams. Your visions are the spirit of pulsing traffic and sparkling skylines. The sweet scented silence perfecting your solitude is the voice of the moonlight
that lives within your skin.
Your deepest peace is the intense blue of lapis lazuli, dug up from the bowels of the earth crushed into fine, expensive powder for Renaissance painters to render the color of the sky in cathedrals of faith. Your passion is the blood-red echoes of wars that you are too young to remember, but too connected not to feel throbbing inside you, next to your desires. And at the very core of you, you are the universe’s inspiration for springtime, a vivid study in green, part chaos and part mythology blossoming for scholars and romantics to feast on for centuries, a million worlds, a million heartbeats, a million days of summer
ready to begin.
poem: Iris Orpi is a Filipina writer living in Chicago, IL. She is the author of The Espresso Effect (2010) and Cognac for the Soul (2012). She was an Honorable Mention for the annual Contemporary American Poetry Prize in 2014. Her work has appeared in over two dozen publications around Asia, North America, Europe, and Africa.
photo: “Sun Daisy (3)” © onetouch grafix
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