Mother

Her lines speak,
her face, a mirror, hardly scratched...
Clouds of questions stream through her lashes and land on the pillow.
The days long gone unroll again in slow laps, around her brow...
Hints of answers spark through her half-closed look....
Age disperses its weariness in peace around her eyes.
The tentacles of intolerance
that once were her fingers,
now outstretched,
groping for another lost answer...
She believes I have it.
But I do not.
And if I did, I would not give it...
for fear that the three stents in her strained arteries...burst...
I am the purity
that you bore and baptized mother,
as clean as your heavenly heels...
as spotless as God can render a human,
and as stained as the devil would try...
For I have been tried...
But the firmament has seen me through.
I lack your serenity,
your solutions...
The mirror of my heart is cracked.
It refracts a myriad shades of your love for me through those long gone days...
And I still love you...
More.

These Dreams

I get these dreams,
of rooms and faces
-the so-called 'Bond of Nightmares' of planes leaving me behind,
and long lost visas.
On the other side, the World has set, the day is gone.
On this side, they burn the Quran,
and praise Jesus, while Jesus cries...

Things unnamed have rooted me here,
sentiments untouched, and thoughts over-protected.
The question looms -Do I really want to be on this side?

What is there to come home to?

My fathers smiles in another room where the ceilings are high and the ocean is nearby...
He holds these purple birds from Paradise, and sends them to flutter in my face...
My sister knees-crossed on the sofa, playing Backgammon with his shadow...
Later, laying rugs of crimson whims down my corridors of dreams...each with a different home-sick pattern...

She resents this side...She already knows...

There is nothing to come home to...