The Tent  

The tent is not a home, 
but an open wound stretched across four poles. 
A piece of cloth shields the bare sky, 
yet it cannot hide the storm that waits for us. 

The tents stand in rows, 
faces without features, 
like beehives drained of honey, 
our voices turned into shattered gasps. 

Inside the tent, no window opens to the sky. 
The wind is the door, 
and the rain writes its letters 
directly upon our bodies. 
Each morning, we wake to one question: 
Are we still alive? 

The tent is a book of fabric, 
its pages the tears of children, 
its letters the breaths of mothers 
hiding milk in hollow chests. 

The tent is not a home… 
yet we learn to hang the faces of the missing 
as if the walls were carved from stone. 
We hide fragments of a scattered country inside it, 
and call it temporary, 
until the temporary becomes destiny, 
and destiny takes the name: exile.