Ashes Breathe the Cane

 Some dreams don’t visit—they descend. They tear open something quiet within you and leave you weeping in the dark, unsure if what you felt was past or prophecy, your pain or that of generations. This was such a dream. I didn’t wake gently. I woke drenched in grief, a cry rising from my belly, as if mourning something far older than me.

I was back in my village, in a place where the soil still holds stories. An elder grandmother—one whose presence is both familiar and enigmatic—stood speaking softly with someone. Her voice was calm, too calm, as she mentioned my siblings. “They were burned,” she said, “in the sugarcane field.”

I froze. Something in me shattered.

I walked toward her, heart pounding, demanding answers—“What happened? Where are they?” Her face did not shift. There was no urgency, no grief. Just a haunting stillness.

And then—suddenly—I was there. Not just hearing of the place, but in it. The sugarcane field towered around me, thick, dry, ominous. I wasn’t alone. My siblings were there, beside me, bound. Tied. We were trapped. And we were begging for mercy.

The flames had not come yet, but the threat was alive. In that moment, I felt their fear, our fear, my own helplessness. I cried—loud and raw. And when I woke, the sobbing didn’t stop. I stayed in bed for what felt like forever, crying not just from the dream, but from something it unearthed.

Was this dream just a nightmare? Or was it memory—ancestral, collective, personal?

Maybe it wasn’t about my siblings at all. Maybe they were parts of me—innocent, unguarded, trapped in some internal place I haven’t yet freed. Or maybe I was being shown what others have lived through, what still lives in the land, in bloodlines, in hidden histories.

The sugarcane fields are real. So are the stories of those who vanished within them—burned not just by fire, but by injustice, silence, erasure. Maybe I cried their tears. Maybe they found me because I could feel them.

Or maybe this is a call—to liberate the parts of me still bound. To seek truth. To honor what has been lost.

Some dreams shake you not to scare, but to awaken. This one scorched something in me, but it also offered a seed: a truth too sacred to ignore.

Tonight, I light a candle. Not to ward off the dream—but to welcome what it came to reveal. To honor those whose names were never spoken. To remember. To rise.