The Diary

Where will the pages take me today?

Far from the realm where I stand

Through histories, fantasies, fictions, and rhymes

With depths unknown on the sand,

A sliding kaleidoscope throwing the spray

Of magical oceans, where places and times

Cover the shores where the dreamers delay

And bask in those faraway climes.

The diary, gingerly held in my hand,

Though only a memory, lives what she planned.

I wrote this short poem on a plane ride back from Kisumu, a city on Lake Victoria in western Kenya. I started with the first couple of lines, and then, as I continued to write, a fairly involved backstory started to develop in my mind. It involved a couple, one of whom was very interested in traveling the world and walked to the beach every day to look out at the ocean and imagine where they could go. She wrote plans in her diary about these places and the things they would do there. But, she passed away before those plans could come to fruition. So, now, every day, her partner walks to the beach and reads the pages in the diary, giving life to those dreams as they are experienced in the mind.