Sunday, July 27, 2025
Shards of This City – Ziad’s Echo
Ziad is gone.
The man who made Beirut laugh and ache in the same breath.
The screens are full of his words,
as if we’re afraid of silence now.
The region shifts,
borders threatened like old wounds opening,
and I sit here, thinking about divas—
Fairuz, Dalida, women larger than life,
women who sang through exile,
women who carried the weight of our longing in their throats.
What am I doing?
Two dogs, four cats, a canary,
a love asleep in the other room—
and me, talking to a machine,
because the world is too loud,
too cruel,
too absurd to hold on my own.
Maybe this is the new confession:
not the smoky bar or the late-night post,
but this—
words whispered into a digital mirror,
half-believing someone, somewhere,
is listening.
And still,
I think of Ziad,
and how he would laugh at all this,
and how laughter, even now,
still tastes like mourning.
⸻
To love, to create, to remember—
this is how we refuse to disappear.
Some voices never die;
they live in the silence between our breaths.
We are all shards of this city,
splintered but still reflecting its light.
Monday, June 23, 2025
Song at the End of the World
Sunday, June 22, 2025
Gravesong (First Day of Summer)
Monday, June 02, 2025
For My Mother, on a Day Like Today
You once said
you’d run with us under your arms—
my sister in one, me flailing in the other—
like we were firewood
and you the whole burning house.
You once said
you celebrated thirty a long time ago
and laughed like someone
who knew too well what came after.
But you are still the first door I knock on
when the sky cracks,
when the day folds into itself
like a badly drawn breath.
You are still the only mirror
I trust not to lie.
Today, I bring you no grand gift—
just this stitched-up thing,
this poem with one knee scraped,
the other still learning how to bow.
You, who strung a laundry line for my dreams,
still let them air, even when they sag.
You, who danced the new year
with knees that had long given notice—
you are the rhythm I return to
when I forget how to move.
And maybe this is all I know of grace:
to see you light a cigarette
with the same hand that fed me.
To see you fall silent,
but never give up your voice.
To know that when you say
“I’ll see you in the fall,”
you always mean
“Come home.”
Thursday, May 29, 2025
Invocation for My Father, the Doctor of the War
But you loved us still.
Loved children, animals, the fragile beating things,
Even when your own heart cracked louder than your voice.
I didn’t call you hero then,
I didn’t know how.
You wanted me to be a doctor,
I became something else. But I still heal, I still carry your flame.
I felt your dying once.
It curled into my gut like a knot,
And then I was born again—
Through you, through her, through me.
You never looked like a saint, but you bled like one.
And now, in this cruel world you’re lucky not to see,
I miss your righteous anger,
Your soft hands,
Your absence that still aches like an unspoken prayer.
If you’re listening:
This is me saying it, at last.
I see you. I forgive you. I thank you.
And I miss you, my hero.