Dreams leaning on the mid-thirties,
And I, at twenty-nine, stand between an age preparing to cross, and an age that hasn’t surrendered its keys yet.
My step on the threshold of thirty is not a step… but a test of the void ahead.
The water... has always been the only side that doesn't quarrel with me.
Were it not for the water, we would have left this homeland to its shadows swollen with corruption,
A homeland filled with the favored, and leaves its children to subsist on what remains of their patience.
It is said: “The homeland is beautiful.”
But beauty does not ache... and what aches is not called beautiful.
We read reality, and find that its seasons are harsher than to be taught,
We try to build upon what has been demolished,
And return to a wall that lost its first stone as if its loss was intended.
We plant, and the soil often refuses to acknowledge what we put in it.
Whales rise, and devour what floats of people’s lives,
And fear rises above their voices until it becomes the voice.
Justice waves from afar, and the paths to it have narrowed,
And the homeland counts its thirty years,
And I count my thirty wishes… without us resembling each other.
We endure…
And souls rise from the hardship of burdens to the expanse of awareness,
From the chaos of passports, and from a right that moves between hands until it loses its features,
And from a look that seeks proof: “Is this for you... or isn’t it?”
Will the press wake from its long slumber?
Will these wounds that shadow us dry?
Will the homeland flourish?
Or will we continue to write about it as if we write what’s left of its spirit?
And I used to dream… until a dream is not held accountable for what it does not do.
By writer Heba Omran Tawalbeh
