Moving to New York

This post makes only a glancing reference to Lebanon, and it wasn't even written by me. My daughter emailed it to me yesterday, although she originally wrote it back in September, when I was still in Beirut. I'm putting it up here simply because I liked it....and because she gave her permission!

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Moving to New York

You: It's a blue moon tonight!

Me: No way! Just like last year.

I've shaken off the breeze when it gave me chills because somewhere in me believed it was still summer. The thrusting of fall is a reckoning. It is a dampening, it is a shrinking.

There is no spot in the swamp that my mind has left behind. My memory clings to those invasive pink weeds, delicate but steadfast. No amount of rain is enough.

The fires that burn under Beirut don't bother my father. He keeps writing away like, what could possibly happen? While next to me, the United States government stalks its prey.

You fly free on eagle wings before I had the chance to wake up. I slept through the sound of your voice on the other end of the phone.

My mother waits, wondering, trumpet blaring in the background. Her love has been poured around the world with no thought of anything in return.

Your eagle wings have carried you beyond yourself, above the Three Sisters. How did we all get so close to the sea?

The fig tree bore not one ripe fig this summer, in protest of my father's absence. As I was leaving, I wondered how I could walk out the door without a single fig to prove that summer had existed.

Nisha Adarkar