Memories of Exile by M. Deeb

Our fortuitous being or not being
where we happen to be, is a frayed
thread in the fate's lapel.

If only the ethereal word blossoms
into homes and people and human warmth
of history, long forgotten by history. And if...

The traumas of apprehension and urgency insinuated
themselves into my fibres and my bones. The child I
once was, feared to look inside and feared

to see the world outside. And when Dali's rubber
clocls greyed into half a century of rubber clocks,
the man is haunted still by echoes: "Where to go?"

I nestle into speckled shadows of olive groves
of what was Palestine, and suddenly see myself
tugging at mother's blood-stained dress,
looking across the border for a place

to stay. In kaleidoscopes of hope and fear,
multiple images of despair and diaspora sprawl
into homes of ambiguity.

To live without a home is to live in exile from
exile, without childhood; for generations in the
womb, to live without a home is to become an illusion.

-from the Arab Free Voice-