beneath a grey sky I have marked time, tallies in the dirt. the same dirt that swallows bones will attest, how it had never grown roots and we haven't either. the diaspora. don’t you see, when daybreak arrives, all that will remain is a fossilized departure; the subtle traces of our spirit, the lingering scent of jasmine. why do we bear the facts as a blown-out candle in a dark room? invisible. sanitized. westernized. alas, we find ourselves planted in a place of mediocracy. so let the locusts sing you into a rugged daze and imagine the brick doors of what could have been, vine-clad and rusted with age. it is disappearing, beyond illusions I call my memories. not in vain, I hope the day will come, in which we may dance across the midsummer night we long for - the land of our ancestors.
I wrote this about being a child of immigrants. I was thinking of the home my father grew up in, the village that raised him. I was imagining myself lying in the shade of an olive tree on the land that we would have still owned, full of chickens and donkeys. Then, I woke up surrounded by cookie-cutter homes and perfectly mowed lawns, stuck in time on the airplane that brought my parents here. I feel like this is getting wordy, but you know what I mean. How do we get past wanting to go home, if our parents sacrificed everything to bring us here? We dream about it.