childhood
Everything is two: our Mother’s hands – from the kitchen, the vegetable garden, from sewing two replacement buttons (not an exact match, but they would do) two strong hands – hoisting baskets of other peoples’ wet sheets, work taken in to feed her two boys two soft hands – cradling our spines, caressing our cheeks, stroking our hair when scraped knees brought hot tears copious cloths, in piles of two, barely enough to deal with the infinite mess […]
It was the richest, most avant-garde, secular country of the entire Middle East. One of the smallest nations of the world held the hearts of people from the region and beyond. Its cosmopolitan heyday lasted roughly from the mid-50s to 1975. It was the emblem of liberalism, of how – at least on the surface – differences can unite a coexisting variegated population: Muslims Sunni and Muslim Shi’ite, Christians. All together in that tiny land of mountains and Mediterranean Sea, […]
I held you so the universe would not suck you in protecting you from the wind, the bullets, the pain mama’s tears, mine our neighbours’ fears I taught you to count while picking up stars to pray be thankful, always we are children taking care of all the children under bombs ammunitions and firing squads in tents in the desert close to a bridge the sewage doomed to forget home (all the bread we broke shared and raised to heaven […]
