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.