Artist: Domenico Lettera, Flyers for Falastin

1.
There’s no use in lamenting,
no use in pointing fingers
at every soul that drifts by.
Weariness clings to my voice

as I try to tell my friend
fleeing war in its first month
how hard it is to grasp anything here.

He tries to calm me,
thinks I lack faith.
He prays.
But who said I wanted prayers?
Maybe…
I just wanted to speak,
to empty the weight from my chest.
Or maybe
I wanted to stab it with a knife.
Do I even know what I want?
I don’t.

I want life.
But I crave death.
I pray to be freed from this land—
yet my heart can’t resist leaving it.

2.
Now I know
what I want is
me.
Yes, maybe that’s it.
I want myself back.
I want a life I deserve.
A land that deserves me,
one that carries my fire beyond the horizon,
that doesn’t dress up survival as strength,
that doesn’t bind me
with green chains of identity,
or lock me in a prison
dragging my people
back to the age before names, before light.

I want a country
that drives me to wander,
to cross each continent barefoot,
to swim wild seas,
to flail in unfamiliar waters.

3.
Water?
My thoughts stop.
There is no water in my land.
No air.
No bread.
No country that feels like a country.

Desert, everywhere.
Even the city’s heart
has turned to dust.
The old markets
Gone.
The ancient mosques
Crushed.
The cafes, the grand hotels–
tanks passed through them,
leaving only sand behind.

4.
And my heart?
It fell apart

when love became a forgotten
word. When I tasted the bitterness of life,
when my back bent
wandering ruins
for a meal
to hush the gnawing inside me.

When I packed my dreams
into a bag
and ran.

5.
In my country
I am not me.
I don’t look like me.
My soul doesn’t know me
and my heart
is a hollow, scorched pit
where something once burned.

I am forgotten here.

So tell me…
can I forget my country?

I don’t even know
if I want to forget it or no.

6.
Let’s try again.
Imagine our worlds
combined.
Arabs hear us,
the West supports us.

Would war have occurred?
Would we lose ourselves?
Our country?
Our beloved?
Friends?
Homes and universities?
I cannot count any more.
Would we lose it all?
But what’s the point?
Arabs deny their Arabness.
Muslims won’t defend their brothers and sisters.
No one is left but Allah.
We fear only Him
—and the bombs, a little.
We fear missiles and shells.
O Allah… rescue what’s left of us.
Return humanity to humans.
And take me to the sky,
no longer just a sky
but a graveyard for our loved ones,
a cradle for our children.
We whispered on their names before bed
and we woke up to find them stolen from us
away
forever.
Did the sky light their path to a new life
and leave us in the darkness?