To be at war with oneself is to prevent war with others

Recently, I’ve been at war with myself
fighting
for a home I’ve never been to
I call it
Nostalgia—a dream,
a calling to a place I can never see
But all I want to be
is in this home:
Falastin—
the agony of living
as a Palestinian
lost in the lands of diaspora
our curse,
to search, die searching
for our place
in other places.
To never feel whole
with a gaping gap in our chests
tugging and pulling,
reminding us that
no matter how full we feel,
it is never real.
We exist in nightmares,
haunted
and hunted down
to non-existence.

Recently, I’ve been at war with myself
a winless battle
Because what I seek
is a quick fix,
instant gratification,
that if I could just want
a free Palestine badly enough,
I could wish it into existence—
but I can’t,
not in this world we live in,
and so I yearn
for a different kind of life
from another time,
when destruction wasn’t so apparent,
when grief might not have felt so heavy.

Often, I find myself at war
with dreaming
with love
with longing
with stillness itself
for never allowing me to find it.

At war,
with what hides itself in my chest,
in a chest, locked and thrown
into the depths of the ocean,
dragging my emotions in with it
to where I’m meant to feel each     crash,
for turning me into a Palestinian poet,
and for making the best of
poetry arise from suffering.

I have been at war,
in search for,
and am starting to believe
I will always crave
more, of a home I must
come to terms with
does not exist
on this earth:

—To be at war with oneself is to prevent war
with others

Painting Courtesy of artist Fahed Mohamed Shehab