À La Carte: Colors for the Diaspora

Blue-green watery globe
tugging to a red core
we are a distant comet,
white cloud of unburnished rocks,
frisking the heavens
for an arc
to earth, sea, home.

Green-brown Palestine,
cactus fruit and wild thyme,
olive orchards, cypress trees…
we travel on your mountain tops
tethered by voices from suitcases
and the yaw of blackened keys.

Blue-black night
silver stars of ancestors
traveling a displaced orbit
around a lost sun, repeating:
when will we see the colors of our land,
when will we land….

 

Zeina Azzam is a Palestinian American writer, editor, and community activist. She works as an editor for a Washington, DC think tank. Her articles have appeared in The Hill, Middle East Eye, Al Jazeera English, and Common Dreams. Her poems have been published in Mizna, Sukoon magazine, Split This Rock, Heartwood literary magazine, and the anthologies Gaza Unsilenced (Alareer and El-Haddad, eds.), Yellow as Turmeric, Fragrant as Cloves (Fowler, ed.), The Poeming Pigeon: Love Poems (The Poetry Box), and Write Like You’re Alive (Zoetic Press). She holds an MA in Arabic literature from Georgetown University.

Photo Credit: Jeff Norman