What do I write to you, our land?
How do we explain our existence to you, our behavior?
I hope you are not disappointed in us. You cannot be,
as we still breathe; this must be your acceptance.
Forgive us for carrying your sorrow from afar.

We are trying to understand this division within us:
between the images of the dead and the lights of the city;
between the scars on your land and the dinners we attend;
between the wounds in the soil, the sadness in the trees, and the
laughter that escapes over a few encounters.

We move through ordinary days while extraordinary grief
lives beneath our skin.

We go to beaches that carry the breeze of Tyre.
We throw ourselves into the arms of our North.
It embraces us, making us imagine you through its
waters that have long intersected with yours deep
in the ocean.

It is a state of madness.

Yet it seems to me that those who remain in the
South are somehow more sane. They walk your fields
with certainty. They belong to the rhythm of your earth.
Whether alive upon your soil or flying above your sky,
they seem closer to something true.

And I feel sick with the juggling.

So we wait.We wait for your echo. For the moment you tell us it is
time to come back. Because only then, I think, will we try to
remember how to breathe again.