Tides of Fire

July 13, 2016, Cairo, Egypt:


 Image result for sad drawings















Time and time again, 
She knew it but looked away 
And felt it strike any way
For not once did knowing care
Nor the child in tow beware 

A wider birth still to sail?
And not one rocky wave in sight
The shore within her arms so tight
The going cool and pale

Steady, stoic, and placid tides
The sons of knowing, daughters of ice
Yet the child in wonder wants
Not ice, not snow, but fire's taunts. (c)

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

My Ghost

Image
It took years to get here. And a lot of thinking, stumbling, and getting up again. I don’t know if I’ve ever known myself to be a woods person, but I honestly don’t know what I could’ve done without the McKintosh Trail in K’jipuktuk. The leaves today had more red in them, the stubborn vegetation leaning into the new season and finally giving in to the inevitable cycle of change. Fall. It’s a sad season for me; reminds me of my birth and the death of romances. To me, September has always symbolized a certain end to possibilities. As a child, I’d hate the end of summer vacation - a time when I’d have to go back to Dubai for school and leave Cairo behind. To my childhood and teen self, Cairo was the pinnacle of all meaning, where things and characters and drama got created. Dubai was small and unassuming, no matter how prettier and cleaner it was.  The connection with the family, the land, and the existential roots during the summer was what I lived for during the school year in Dubai...
Read more

Stockholm Syndrome and First-Generation Immigrants in Nova Scotia: A Quick Reflection

Image
Stockholm Syndrome among racialized immigrant communities in Canada has always been a thing, but I got to taste a very real version of it at a recent one-on-one conversation with another first generation immigrant in the Nova Scotian Muslim community. The unsaid gist of what he was telling me - in relation to my equity-seeking posts - was basically, “how dare you be so free when my colonized mind never allowed me to be?”  There are depths to this trauma manifestation, this syndrome, in the colonized psyche that go beyond idolizing the oppressor and adopting their language and logic. There is also a sense of wanting everyone else who fits the category to be shackled by the same disease; a desire by the oppressed for the perpetuation of the cycle of oppression so as not to be alone in their trauma. “If I’m not free, then neither should you,” kind of thing.  Another psychological layer for this desire for perpetuation may be guilt. Oppression trauma involves a very real layer of ...
Read more

Invisible Leavings

Image
August 2017, Halifax, Canada: There are energies associated with places, I have come to believe. The character of a certain venue may not be simply about the light quality, decor, finishing, colors or its smells. I think an important component is its energy, it's own specific vibe. And that is not merely the charge you get off the people that are in that place at the time you're in it; it may also involve the energy left by people who were present in the past. The "invisible leavings" of people, I've star ted to call it in my mind...the ghosts of the place.  Not in a horror movie kind of way, but in the way that you enter a quiet tidy coffee shop and you're struck by an intuition that it was loud a few minutes ago. Or when you go into a room full of coworkers who greet you with perfectly pleasant politeness, but you can tell you've been dissected with their judgement just before you walked in. And in that way that old cities such as Cairo and Alexandri...
Read more