By: Manal Rabiey
It is as if I live upon a floor of colored glass; every step shatters beneath me like fragments of a broken dawn, never finding rest or stillness. I try to summon silence, but only a green tremor comes to me, like mint leaves trembling under the cold breath of night. Everything I have received arrived unbidden, like a rainbow landing by mistake upon my window—its colors vivid, yet untouchable—as though fate had handed me bouquets too large for my trembling fingers. I open them and find only golden dust that scatters in the air and never settles upon my heart.
I write the word “home” and walls rise around me without doors—walls painted ash tinged with violet, their ceilings of heavy gray cloud dripping cold water upon my bare shoulders. I search every corner for a door and find only a mirror returning my face in a thousand shades. At times the door appears as a thin golden line that gleams then vanishes, like a flash of a celestial bird leaving its wing suspended in the air. In the long corridors I breathe the scent of damp stone and hear the beat of my heart like ancient drums losing their echo in emptiness.
Yet I go on writing. I plant balconies of white jasmine between the walls and color the floor with my red steps. I paint a turquoise sky on the ceiling, scattering small sugar-like stars, and hang on the walls the seasons I have lived but never completed. Perhaps the poem will open for me a door of light at the end of the line, and inside I will find a home that inhabits me as I have inhabited words. The ink itself becomes blue water flowing through my veins; the lines rise as high balconies overlooking a garden of light, where I can stretch out my hand and touch the wing of that celestial bird before it disappears. Only there can I say: here is my home, here is the door I had never found before.
