While Time Walked On
I slept as time slipped quietly by
Was my slumber as deep as theirs
those youths of Eshab-i Kehf,
drifting through corridors of an ancient dream?
I forgot myself,
my name, my shape, my soul.
Memory vanished;
day and night faded into the same pale shade.
The world turned its tale,
weaving grief into the loom of history.
COVID devoured the breath of millions,
and still, I slept.
How many dawns passed? I cannot say.
In Palestine, they died,
And then I awoke.
But soon the air grew heavy,
Smoke thick with sorrow pulled me under again.
In that hush,
cries echoed through the void:
“End the war, stop the dying.
I can bear no more.”
Still, I lay
curled in the hollow of the earth,
while time stepped over me,
while time passed through me,
leaving a wonder I could not name.
Was I alive? Was I gone?
Or suspended between,
a guest of some ghostly dream?
My mind, a fractured mirror,
its pieces scattered in silence.
Fatigue, a fog pressed against the soul.
And here I linger still...
an aching wraith, a solitary watcher
at the fragile gate of sleep.
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