Underwater Dreams
Five steps from the shore,
I dive and enter another world.
A world defined by silence and riotous color
On Sudan
My land, my home, my African heart
You gave me language, character.
You straddled two worlds like a giant.
To My Younger Self
One day you will think,
“I am a fuse in the centre of an armed camp.”
One day you will feel like the panther in Rilke’s poem,
First Love
You walked into my garden much later in life.
I didn’t expect that.
After we’ve lived way past all our illusions
Forever…
Forever is the word we whisper to our children
As they fall asleep to the sound of sonic booms.
It is the only gift we can give them, a promise of continuity
My Illustrating Poetry Series
For the past couple of years, I have been working on a passion project, a series of illustrating lines from my original poetry. I take a line from a poem I wrote and I create an illustration based on that line with that particular quote written in brush lettering style as part of the illustration. I have only done around 3 so far but more will be coming soon.
Road to Self
Someday, a man will marry you,
Not because he loves you,
To A Palestinian Child
One day, I will watch you playing in the olive groves
And under the lemon trees.
Remembering
This is a companion piece to my poem “First Love”. It is an ode to the potency of memory, no matter how brief a relationship is. As Neruda famously wrote: “Love is so short, forgetting is so long.”
To Noureen
Noureen, Born with the sun inside your skin
Faith
Nothing is clean.
Nothing is pure.
Not even me.