The Lightning Dreamer (7 page)

 

I can't help plunging
into the heart of each line
just as thoroughly
as if all the dreams
and disappointments
were my own.

We feel transformed.
Each word of each play
helps us imagine
distant lives.

 

Scenes that make the nuns cry
leave us smiling behind our
veiled curtain
of wishes.

 

We long to try new tales,
even the forbidden ones
about giants and vampires
with unnatural skills.

 

We are always eager to play
any role that contains
Tula's magic.

I long to write like Heredia,
but what do I know of great cities
and the wide lives
of men?

 

I cannot write panoramas
of history—my narrow view
is framed by rigid window bars
and the songs of one tiny
caged bird.

 

I'm just a silenced girl.
My stories are simple tales
of emotion.

 

Will my words always be
glowing coals
instead of leaping
flames?

There is an opening
in the orphanage wall.
On a revolving wooden shelf,
gifts from the outside world
are received.

 

Each time the shelf spins,
I rush to see the surprises.
Townsfolk donate cakes, coins,
and clothing—small gifts that twirl
into this isolated orphanage
from beyond the high wall
of carved stone.

 

One day, the spinning shelf screams
and I'm the first to arrive. I discover
an infant, squirming
and squalling
on the polished circle
of time-smoothed wood.

 

The shrieking baby's arrival
is eerie. It seems unnatural,
until I peer through the gap
in the wall and see a girl
around my own age.

 

She is elegantly dressed,
but she weeps like a beggar
as she rushes away.
When she glances back
over her silk-clad shoulder,
her face is as pale
as a cloud.

 

She lifts a finger to her lips,
and I understand that she
is asking me to keep a secret.

 

She has abandoned her own
newborn infant.
Why? How?

I seize the baby and hold him close.
He falls silent, breathing against me.

 

When I gaze down at his black eyes
and warm cinnamon-hued skin,
I can hear a story unfolding . . .

 

The mother looked Spanish.
The father must be African.
This child was abandoned
simply because
he is brown.

Now that Tula knows
why most of the orphans
are given to us, she is desolate.
How can it be?
She wants to know
if the baby's parents are in love.
Is the father a freed man or a slave?

 

She asks the same questions
over and over,
and we give the same answer,
our true one—
we don't know.

 

All we know
is that most of the orphans we care for
are not really orphans, but children
with living parents who reject them
out of ignorant fear.

 

So many people
have not yet learned
that souls have no color
and can never
be owned.

Where can I put this mountain
of grief
and rage?

 

Sadness needs a papery home,
but my borrowed feather pen
is not skillful enough
to tell such a horrible
true tale.

 

It is a story far more monstrous
than any gruesome legend
of vampires
or werewolves.

With the moon as my audience,
I whisper the tragedy
of abandoned babies
in every form I can imagine—
rhymed and free verse,
a story, an essay, a play . . .

 

But my words are never
strong enough
or public enough
to bring justice
for brown orphans.

 

If I ever find the courage
to reveal their secret openly,
will readers be brave enough
to listen
and care?

The only thing I can change
is myself. There is no way to alter
the orphans' loss, or my own
sorrowful home.

 

Fourteen is such a cruel birthday.
My mother and grandfather
are already planning
to auction me away
to the highest-bidding
rich man.