noise licking my ears

I can never get used to the sound
arriving after glory of silence
with many tongues licking my ears

in a car with a stranger

- Which country held your body, the times your brain was working?
- Soils, with different twisted tongues: one for home, one for elsewhere
I pay my attention to the window, where the nose of the lady meets a setting sun

- The horizon is beautiful
there's a muffed silence in the car, like fog rising
from the dashboard onto the glass

- Why did you reverse your footsteps?
- in what sense is a return a reversal:
reversal denote eraser and who wants to erase their history?

- What is your direction of prayer?
- the same direction of the sun, Eastward,
not a key change if prayer is still kept as a habit

- You sound an awful lot like someone who....
- Got cut out from a rooted tree?
there's a muffed silence in the car, like fog rising

- where is home?
I look from the dashboard to the glass
I close my eyes.

lines that ran away from me

-theft, like other people, escaped me
- when I least expected
- the thought that ran to the edge of the world
- there was a song about a tree
- once was, there once was not
- it is not the end of tales, their beginnings
- you speak a lot like I do, with a borrowed tongue
- city of stone and ash, keep me
- scribbled down diaries that contain the universe
- this fate, these lines, the jumble
- the words that connect, the lines that let go.

Why?

Why grow roots when wings can lift you up,
but why develop wings when you can just stay rooted in earth
why then, this struggle to be one thing over the other
you are the world but settle in a piece of ground

you evade me

with music, as if running away needs its own track
what lies you have gifted yourself the chance to trust

with silence, you greet the day
for the lack of noise can clear what remains of the eclipse in you

lunar, a temperamental evening
with art, you evade coming to terms with your smile

they call it survival's guilt
this compelling need to redesign yourself

with all this movement
will there be  stillness? I hear you ask

When I first came back

When I first came back
I saw the tree-tops, ashen green
I had forgotten that this is how olives grow old
with dust wrinkling their hair

when I first came back
there was a pull in the sand the lined the shore
bagged over to the West from where the river lies
like the pull on my ear before landing

When I first came back
no building was higher than it neighbor
equal in high the stone and man
man and stone

when I first came back
the sun was shining but I wanted
to close my eyes
too much light in a small space takes weight on my lids

when I came back
there was no music, no tapping of hands
or shoulders to shoulder
in a line to invite, entice to dance

when I first came back
I vowed never to leave you again
but each time I leave you become more beautiful
this is the deal with homelands
the further they get from us
the nicer they claim to be
put on their jewels and drag us back
to face our own misery.