I.

He arrived 

In this delirious city

Four years ago, 

Old buildings being torn down,

Histories collapsing,  

Everyone is lost 

Asking what to keep,

How can you move

Unencumbered 

And light?

Without baggage 

Of a choice which can either be

A consequence 

Or redemption?

How can you be that tribe 

Who are thought to walk backward 

Into the future

Constantly mediating 

The ever-transforming present? 

But change is happening not only here,

Even in the other city 

He left behind,

That worn out city,

Raped

Again and again 

But no one could truly claim,

All he could do now 

Is to remember 

How he closed his fist

Fighting for it 

To be a place

For living and dying,

For  finding happiness

In the company 

Of everything familiar

He now finds himself  

Neither here nor there,

In between spaces,

In two countries--

Working here

While dreaming in the other

II.

During this leave-taking, 

Let us stay in silence

Until our fear lose meaning,

Until we slowly slide back 

Into the flow of time

I am not worrying,

Because we’ve been kind to each other,

There will be no heavy promises 

We need to keep

You see,

All things can pass

With our sympathy

If we understand ending

As means to be truly alive and to begin

I know I will no longer be next to you 

To chase shadows of poets,

Lift their words 

And carry meanings together

But you know what I would say

If I were on your side,

“You do not analyze them,

You take them as breath,

Light them as fire

Until they burn and turn us into ashes,

This is the only way we can be reborn again”

III.

There is sadness 

In all things today:

The little girl in the lobby 

With her dad 

Waiting for a school bus---

They appear diffracted 

Behind the glass pane

Like their waiting to return 

To their stolen home, Palestine

The construction workers 

From India,

Waiting for the lift 

To take them up 

To finish buildings,

They all silently hum 

A mantra that can reach Kerala

I can hear their love ones 

Replying back with,

“Take care papa.”

The cab driver 

Waiting for his flight stewardess passenger,

As he sees her rolling out her bag,

He must be guessing 

The country where she is off to,

"There must be that kind of rain there 

That pours 

And disappears quickly 

That I miss so much of Ethiopia."

There is sadness 

In all things today:

In the sky struggling 

For its last breath,

In the incoming rain,

In the skyscrapers made into 

Haunting shadows

In the traffic light 

Blinking yellow

Everyone is asking for strength 

So they could stay longer 

In the hardness of the desert

I come home to a door 

That I haven’t opened yet

It already tells me 

There’s nobody waiting

I look at this milkfish 

Am defrosting in the sink

Whose mouth is wide open,

It seems it had last uttered,

“An unquestioned life 

Is not worth living”

IV.

You feed me here, 

Your poems make me alive,

They warm me in cold winter nights,

Allowing me to sleep bare

Answering your poems

Crystalize everything 

I could form the shape of hurt,

To know fully what I suffer

“Is it too much to swing

This world to forgiveness?”

I am now forcing myself to love 

The paleness of these dunes 

That take a lifetime to do so 

There is violence in silence

It arrives in the smallest hour

And all I could do is enter a memory 

And not come back

There, we own each other

Nobody is staying behind 

Watching the other disappear, 

No one needs to bear