‘You don’t have to look far to understand exile’: These poems are a call to our common humanity

Exile is not a Foreign Word

To understand exile, you don’t have to look
further than the family down the street
who lost their home and all they owned,
including their pets, in a fire, or a foreclosure,
or the mass of people reaching their arms out
to rescuers who pull them out of the water
in the sudden hurricane that sweeps the coast
where you live, or the birds that drop dead
at your feet and you smell the smoke
of wild fire blazing through a forest up north.
You don’t have to look far to understand exile
and homelessness. True, you still have a state
you claim as yours. But the sensation of being
in a vacuum, a dead zone, arises when your name
etched on an identity card or online records
cannot verify your existence, yes, that too
is the reality of anyone who swears by a country,
not to mention if your palms are charred
and your face alters with hurt.

Letter to Mahmoud Darwish

You had nightmares that the street you grew up in
forgot you, that the doors of the familiar vanished.
You wrote to melt the walls but saw them harden,
as you stirred your tea, breathing the Paris air,
memorising last night’s images. But if you are here,
you’d fall on your knees in the dust and weep
to see the children of Gaza, your kin,
buried in the fiery wreckage of Israel’s rage:

How can the ones who’ve seen death’s emissaries
become those...

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