What If?…

What if we were born with a gift,
What if this gift could
Take us anywhere, anytime.
What if this gift could
Create oceans and continents,
Bring to life myths and fairytales,
Dragons and vampires.
What if this gift could
Make us captain of a ship,
A ship that could fly.
What if this gift could
Melt everything around us
And let us
Float on it.
What if we were born
With imagination

What if, as a child,
We were told stories and fairy tales.
What if, as a child
We were pushed to create other realities
And we were taught it’s okay to live in them
For a while,
And we practiced this in school
Like we do with real reality.
What if, as a child,
We were told that other realities
Were as important as real reality
And that real reality was not really real
Anyway.
And what if as a child,
We were shown how to create places
That protect us from real reality,
When we need to.
What if, as a child,
We were taught to use
Our imagination

What if, as adolescents,
We could retreat to those realities we create
When we feel bad, when we feel sad,
And we were given time to do so.
What if, as adolescents,
We were taught to notice when we need
To retreat, to go to another world,
To find peace
For a while.
What if instead of saying no to drugs
No to addiction
We said yes
To imagination.

What if, as adults,
We were skilled at new realities
At creating new worlds for ourselves
For our children.
What if, as adults,
We used these new realities
To create a better world for ourselves
For our children.
And what if we used these new realities
To combat stress, cancer and addiction.
And what if we used these new realities
To show what peace in the world might look like
To show what society could be if we were human.

What if we used
Our imagination.