Water Lantern Festival
An autumn poem (by me, human) overlaid on an AI -generated visual (Midjourney), and its backstory.
Back story of this poem: two summers ago, I attended a water lantern festival in Chicago with my son. It was my first time doing so and I was struck that many of the lanterns that were being floated into the Chicago River had love notes to the departed loved ones of the senders.
Reading some of the lit lanterns that floated our way, it felt like a send-off for all our beloved that have passed en masse to the world beyond. That was 2021, and the vaccines for Covid have just started to roll out then, so that was the time when people have lost a lot of dear ones, in varying degrees of closeness, in their lives.
In those warmly lit cubes of fire and air were messages of love and fond memories, sometimes confessions of regret and wishful prayers. Hearts and stars and words in English, Spanish, Polish, and an occasional script of Sanskrit-looking characters here and there were a reminder of both the universality and intimacy of love and loss, the expansiveness and depth of our common humanity in life and death.
The festival, was, indeed, a communal mourning ritual, as well as a bonding celebration of life, both spent and still being lived. Due to the overwhelming atmosphere of mourning, it hardly occurred to me then, that the lantern festival was also a reflective gesture of saying goodbye to summer, both in the rhythmic cycle of the natural world, and the symbolic passing of one’s younger years.
It is in this two latter meanings that I feel the most attuned to, at this juncture of the seasons. Those, and the streams of friendship and love that the years have floated by.
