Finding homeland

I’ve learned things don’t always translate

and the way I speak is testament to that.

The words that slip across my tongue betray me,

my mind begs for only one thing,

and when I am thrown to the edge of my seat and told to sing,

I find myself frozen.

A bird trapped in my chest—

she cries for freedom

she does not sing.

And in the hard eyes of the cashier,

the unlaughing faces,

the cold breeze of winters my people never knew,

I find myself somewhere lost.

Somewhere far gone from ancestors who harvested the crop from the old hanging tree,

who washed and kneaded and pressed and poured until jars and jars lay neatly against window

sills.

Jars poured over spices and rice,

rubbed into broken skin— mending broken hearts too.

And my people of the cedars

when the moon of loneliness hovers above me here in foreign land,

I wonder what she sings to you over there across water and mountain.

Does the sea whisper of love?

Does warm music follow you like shadow, like laughter? Does it erase all pain?

And you, you know pain more than anyone:

Your famished peoples

Your ravaged cities

Your poets who speak of yesterday and longing

Your ancient cedars that barely tremble in the wind

Your olive groves of thousands of years destroyed by war

And yet, your people, they still sing.

I see it in the morning when I am reminded by the mother crossing the street that my mother —

she crossed oceans and borders.

I see it in the church where they still sing of your cedars, still draw hope from you my homeland.

I see it in the candles lit at each new holy site I journey for— these candles, they are prayers for

you.

And in the grassland and the forest and in the mountains that I have trekked to silence the world,

to turn within to find you again dancing in my soul,

to find the music of the lute,

to find the Mediterranean that birthed people of salt and grit and beauty,

to find your vine leaves wrapped carefully around rice by children for their mothers who

wrapped leaves and sang too for their mothers,

to find the beauty of melancholy in one voice who sings for you, Li Beirut,

to dance amidst the rubble and still wear that bold lipstick, that dark kohl eyeliner because our

women are fearless—

that is to find homeland again.

A Heartache song

Today I feel the solitude so keenly.

So slowly, I have become what I’ve always known:

The trees bare in the winter.

The lilacs— their short lives, their springtime glory, their summer death.

The ancestors, their pull to a broken land I’ve always wanted to call home.

And my grandmother— a beautiful woman, a tragic forgetting.

I don’t want you to resent me for having loved you so deeply,

but I want you to remember me at least.

So I’ll sit here for a while and sing you this song

that I named after a future daughter I’ll someday have:

Oh nighttime beauty, oh moonlight song

Oh heartache— you shatter me so fiercely now.

My heart I know to be strong and yet so, so small.

And now we laugh about the sunsets, we cry over tea in our cups.

We stand silently amidst the quiet willows.

We listen for their heartbeats, we hear birds instead.