On A Fieldtrip To The Botanical Gardens, Kenya Gets A Lesson (Not In The Lesson Plan) Poem by M. Ayodele Heath

If she could, she would choose
to be the color of Yellow cosmos, French lavender,
Texas paintbrush (or a Shasta daisy at the very
least) : Anything but the color of pots
& kettles! Which she is. Which is when

a chaperone, who also happens
to be her Mother, rebuts: But Kenya,
you are also the color of Night,
whose beauty cannot even be contained

by Earth, nor expanding galaxies, wandering
exquisitely as the thoughts of God. The color
of Infinity, if it had one; of Eternity,
if it ever paused to be measured. My daughter,

you are the dream where God made Earth's first
black volcanic beaches, whose undulating soot
would birth cosmos and lavender and paintbrush,
but whose first bloom was you: a hue

so divine and heavy, no lesser flower
could bear it.