Dear Home, Dear Silence

(2024)

At dusk, the sky weeps over our roof

and the aluminum sheet won’t stop singing its sympathy.

If you ever read about loss, you would know 

there is no softer name for it. 

Outside, the leaves, like tambourines, shiver under 

the wind’s blaze – a truce between dance and loss.

Maami slides into the living room and crashes into an armchair, 

Dad’s favorite one, and her sigh blows with emptiness.

She opens her dream and every time a thousand lamentations

keep wrecking her lips. Let’s agree, nothing can keep 

a holed heart, not a home that once glistened with  

Father’s bass and held the children’s laughter between 

its walls, walls that’re now cracked under the siege of time and silence. 

Here, after every joke, a war breaks, and our wounds won’t stop

scabbing. Healing never ends, it is a perpetual ritual

keeping wet the leftovers of our grief.

The fierce wind, whistling, won’t halt hurling against 

the already cracked walls. Like our hearts, dusk ceases 

to outgrow its darkness, and dawn never comes.

My Country Yawns at My Effort to Live

(2024)

Upon the quicksand of logic, I build my doubts.

Years gnawed thin by fear swirl southwards

of my dreams like a whirlpool. When night falls,

loneliness falls with it. So I lean against the evening, 

in search of solitude, as birds nest on skeletal trees, 

whose branches are vacant with thirst.

I look beyond the throat of the wind 

where birds fall into flight,

and find idleness teething in the mouths

of men – there’s no life here, only greed, and crime keeps 

growing in the air like cancer. I’m sorry I survived. 

My country yawns at my efforts to live. 

Here, a living fire, the heart that lit it, and the hands burdened 

by the weight of its wreckage, keep fastening into an unending cycle.

I’m just a boy ramming into the crest of life.

Carrying this wound with a smile doesn’t make it less painful, but

while some offer pale regrets and weary words in the shape of shadows,

I sit in a gentle deep, my silence kindling comfort, and wish 

for a light ending with a strange insistence.

In the Garden, Nature Sings

(2024)

In the garden, the first light of dawn touches 

the hem of a hibiscus like a moon piercing 

through the night. The leaves, swollen with dew

after hours of silence, freeze chaos under its wings. 

An anthill stretching over the wall peeps 

through my window, hoarding the soundless 

march of a colony. A butterfly, like an angel

floating through hazy brightness, finds me

kneeling to pick war out of my country’s teeth. 

Like history, a flower forgets its petals.

A prayer leaves me.

A cock crows through the silence. Like Jericho, 

everything remains still until an amen crumbles.