Correspondence with Apologies

^{for Mahmoud Darwish}

I missed you by a few days. We moved to the city where you were scheduled to read. But your heart had its own timeline. All my life I have listened to your voice thunder and grieve. I have memorized your words. Unoriginal, I know, given their stature and my heritage, but it was an act of devotion to poetry. When so much of the music I loved I let go, yours stayed. It’s a song, it’s a song, I’d hum to myself, between wars. Lately, I walk around with a poem of yours I did not memorize in childhood coursing through my veins. No water, no sky, no medicine. No friends and no fortresses. No sail. The sail always catches in my throat. They say you drafted it on one of those boats carrying fighters into the unknown. The lore always imagines it heightens the tragedy. It’s good you are not here. So many of us have been whispering this bitterness to loved ones who passed before the genocide began. This time, we outdid ourselves, left our Romans in the dust. This time, there were no masks to fall.