By Dr. Adnan Bozan

In Afrin,
my mother used to smooth the wheat-braids on the brow of the mountain.
In Kobani,
my father was mending the sun with his limping hand.
In Hasakah,
my sister fed the birds from the loaf of a poem...
But the wind came uninvited,
and devoured the soil...
and the letter...
and the voice...
and the shadow.

O my homeland...
you who lie piled up like a wound in the archives of the invaders,
like a poem the poet wept before writing it,
like a song lost in exile before it was even born.

Do you hear me?
I am the son of the cloud, slaughtered in the heights of memory.
I am the tear that dried in the eyes of the camps.
I am the body that tried to cross the sea...
and drowned in its own shadow, not in water.
I am the wind...
when even the wind goes out.

Do not seek me on the map...
for I dwell in the letters of loss,
inhabit exiles with no window,
displaced in ink...
a refugee to language...
and hunted from all sides—even in the poem.

In Daraa,
the first boy screamed,
and the galaxies of fear shook in the heart of the Sultan.
And in a city that used to sing to life...
the poems were buried beneath the rubble.

In Damascus,
the streets sold their blood to buy silence,
and the jasmine remained suspended between an official statement
and a hand waving from beneath the debris.

There is no use in hanging poetry on clotheslines,
nor in washing the conscience with the water of the United Nations.
For the world...
is blind—except to oil fields,
and mute—except in the screams of the dollar.

I say to you:
Poetry does not rebuild homes,
nor bring back the girl who slept on a booby-trapped stone,
but it...
grants the tear its right to confess,
and gives the shadow a homeland—when light exiles it.

In Qamishli,
I walked on the heads of memory—
every stone a flute,
every alleyway a chant of death.
In Serekaniye,
I saw the dove migrating on a thread of blood,
falling into the mouth of a soulless rifle.

O poetry...
be a boat when the flood rises in my throat,
be a rope with which I strangle my silence,
be an exile unlike this exile.

For the homeland...
is not that map waved by politicians,
but a mother’s tear when she opens the door of absence and finds no one,
it is the child’s bread kneaded with fear,
it is the refugee’s scream when the sea forgets him.

In Saidnaya,
the guillotine performs ablution each morning with a poet’s blood,
and the candle asks about a night that never ends.

O world...
O elegant whore dressed in principles,
why do you embrace Sham when she bleeds,
then trade her away for silence toward her killer?
Why do you offer her bouquets of poems by day,
and a “smart” bomb by night?

We ask for nothing more than one honest word,
a small light not sold at auction,
a shadow that is not violated.

In Kobani,
I used to write on the school’s walls:
“Freedom never dies,”
and the school died, but the letter remained...
guarding my fear in exile.

I am... the son of a dream
that never came true,
the poem never recited,
the homeland divided between a map
and a pierced memory.

Bear witness, O clouds...
that we walked barefoot through the night of ruin,
wrote the names of our cities on tattered shoes,
and told the jasmine: do not fear—
the next poem... shall be a homeland.