Peace & Pieces
Arbutus Unedo
That night
the stars had spoken
in languages my ribs do not know.
But my soul heard its hymn
a dialect only dead birds remember.
And something beneath me wept,
like an old god waking
in the wrong myth.
A thread caught in the teeth of the wind,
a fracture humming behind the sky
I almost followed.
But Artemis blinked,
and I mistook it for mercy.
There is a kind of silence
that doesn’t wait to be filled
it just lives,
like moss
on the edge of a forgotten well.
Some eyes whisper secrets
like they had seen the rooms
I keep padlocked from within.
But I know the trick
of borrowed gazes
they don’t stay.
They never do.
Something in those glances
whispered the sorrow
still on its way.
A premonition,
soft-spoken,
but loud enough to echo
inside the marrow.
I’ve always been a recluse.
Not hidden, just unentered.
Feeling is a fire
and I’ve never trusted warmth.
It flickers.
It leaves.
It learns your name
only to unlearn it.
And yet
there were moments
I tucked beneath my tongue
like stolen incense:
the way some silences touch mine,
the sound of a sentence
that almost became a song.
But I won’t voice it .
Not because I can’t
but because I am a staircase
to a house I will never live in.
And so
I bury the seed
before it dreams of root.
I leave the orchard hollow
before the bloom learns my name.
Some hearts
were made to pulse in exodus.
Mine carries a map
drawn in every language I fled.
To stay is to confess.
To confess is to kneel.
And I was born
with no knees.
Verses for the Hollow Empire
I swallowed a compass as a girl
it only spins toward the buried.
There is a sea beneath my ribcage
that has never touched the sun.
They dressed me in borrowed skies
and told me to forget the smell of jasmine
before war deflowered it dry.
In their cities, time walks upright,
but in mine, it limps
carrying an urn
that hums my grandfather’s laughter.
I once found God asleep
in my cracked teacup…
his breath smelled of cardamom and grief.
I asked him why we bleed in languages
no one dares to archive.
The walls here whisper in colonial grammar.
I reply in the syntax of ghosts.
Last night I dreamt of a prophet
with bullet-holes for eyes.
He told me:
“Sing, even if your mouth is full of sand.”
So I do.
lungs formed in the hush of borders
and a throat carved from all the unsaid
between Cairo and Beirut.
