Prologue

The residue of black coffee
Drained on a saucer
Tells a story
Of stained red pomegranate hands
Twisting beneath the drenched stream of thoughts
Drawing blood from a stone
Bleeding daylight through aluminum windows
Where our names lay carved in the wooden frame below
Crafting philosophies out of metaphors
And listening to the olive groves breathing in the midnight
Sheep grazing under watchful Bedouin eyes
Dust dancing the tango on a hillside
Just a stone’s throw from the reeling
That lines the sidewalks of unborn cityscapes
And relentless architecture
Rogue, sweet, radical, vivid, violent, fragile, serene
Panicked and bitter like green tea
We bury the wilderness of our youth
Deep beneath the vertical landscapes of thorny bushes
Like they were the world’s best-kept secret

And when we need to, we whisper them in hushes
And grow new tales ripe for the telling
Co-authoring the unfolding blank pages
With ink drenched in the red stains of fruits; permanently
Like us.
We draw our lines in the sands of present tense and say: this is just the prologue
Scribbled in the language of memory
Where the after makes no introductions;
And before is fraught with rude departures
The stage can only bear one scene at a time
One verse, one stanza, one rhyme at a time
But we are relentless
We write furiously
As if these pages could not contain us
These lines could not restrain us
This language could not bear us nor its words
Accurately portray us
We write till the ink runs dry

And still, the residue of black coffee drained on a saucer
Tells a story just waiting to be told

But really,
It's in the telling
That we make our mark on this world