The Language of Grief
Poetry on Palestine, longing, and love
I spoke your name to the dunes, their silence a mirror to my grief. Each grain of sand— a word I never said, a touch I never offered.
How vast is the desert of longing, how endless its horizon. No shadow falls here but yours, no wind moves but to echo the sound of your absence.
Come back, and I will pour oceans into your palms, spill my breath to unbury the stars hidden in the hollow of your leaving.
What is love but a wound that refuses to heal?
Your absence sits in my chest like a bird with broken wings, beating against the cage of my ribs. Each flutter a reminder that flight is no longer possible.
I lit candles for you in the garden, but the wind came. It always comes, doesn’t it? Stealing light, stealing warmth.
You once said love is eternal. But I wonder— is it the bloom or the ash that lingers? The warmth of a touch, or the cold ache it leaves behind?
Grief speaks in a tongue I have learned too well, a tongue heavy with loss, its alphabet carved from olive pits and bullet casings. It recites the names of hills that bleed into the sea, of streets where shadows dance beneath broken lanterns.
Who will teach me another language— one where the trees do not weep and the earth does not swallow the voices of children?
Oh, Palestine, your rivers run backwards, your fields bloom with ashes instead of wheat. I hold your soil in my palm and feel the weight of exile, its scent sharper than jasmine, its silence louder than a call to prayer.
Grief writes my name beside yours in the book of the forgotten, but I refuse to be erased. Even if my voice cracks, I will speak you into existence until the dawn remembers where it belongs.