I can give myself a thousand labels,
But none would hold the weight of my name.
I step outside and fall on my knees,
My soil does not ask where I have been.
I rise from the same ashes
That left history
An open wound,
A manuscript where sorrow inscribes itself
With the ink of uprooted tongues.
Yet, I have inhaled the misery of the land,
Where the sun folds its wings at dusk
And the olive trees bow without a voice.
In the mellow wand of decay,
The wind closes, cries out its lungs.
Who do I tell, sir? The walls do not listen,
The roads do not answer back.
All I want is to find that which neither was nor will be,
A dawn untouched by loud footsteps,
By the echoes of soldiers pressing into the skin of morning.
A sky that does not carry the weight of absence,
Where birds do not vanish mid-flight.
May the absence of labels will find me at last,
Peeling away like old paint on my forgotten door.
But what about the absence of home?
The absence that tastes of brutal salt,
That hums beneath my ribs like a ghost.
Then the headlines speak of a lost world,
My lost world.
I can't help but look them in the eye and ask:
Who killed the song?

Ohona Anjum occasionally writes for Star Books and Literature.