Each morning, I open the news
like a door onto fire.
I search the rubble for a face I know,
for a sentence to steady my heart:
“We are still alive.”
but no sentence ever finishes.
only names falling
from a wall no one passes anymore.
I live here.
but my heart is still in Sudan—
in the courtyard
where my shadow grew longer each summer.
Where mango juice stained my clothes,
and my mother’s laughter
was the only shelter from the heat.
Exile?
It is planting a tree in borrowed soil
and watering it with memory.
It is watching your homeland
in a foreign documentary
and weeping
when the narrator mispronounces Wad Madani.
They ask,
Where are you from?
I say,
from a country that bleeds
while the world shuts its eyes—
indifferent.
I want to scream.
I want to curse.
but my sentences have shrunk—
as if I blame language
for failing to stop a bullet.
Some days, I forget my own face.
I look in the mirror
and see a woman who resembles my mother,
but her features are blurred—
born in more than one tongue,
raised in scattered cities,
belonging to none.
I call my daughter
just to make sure I still exist.
in her voice—my mother’s echo.
in her defiance—a seed from the land
she left
before she knew its name.
Writing is my last fortress.
when words fail in my mouth,
I bleed them onto paper.
trying to recover what scattered in me,
or keep the ones I love
alive
even if they now exist
as breaking news.
Each story I write
is a failed return,
and a deeper failure to forget.
I only wanted a home.
but the country gave me a poem
and took the key.
In war,
silence is more terrifying than bombs.
I wait for news that never comes,
for a picture that isn’t taken,
for a body left in the open—
no one left alive
to bury it.
and through all of this,
I come to you.
not as an escape—
but as the last remaining thing,
the war has not learned how to kill.
Love.
