for my father

I miss my father and regret so much that I wasn't able to be there for him in his last days. I walk in the streets, my eyes streaming with tears like thunder, but no rain comes from the sky.

Palestinian Poet Laureate, Mahmoud Darwish,

“To faces which wither under the mask of melancholy,
I bow
To roads on which I forgot my tears,
to a father who died as green as a cloud
with a sail upon his face,
I bow ."

Ibn Abbas- "When I visit you and the moon
Isn't around to show me the way,
Comets of longing set my heart
So much ablaze, the earth is lit
By the holocaust under my ribs"

How can I be coherant with the earth is ablaze to me, in a fiery conflagration from the holocaust under my ribs, as I mourn the death of my father, who wrote in sky-azure letters the word freedom, to escape between eternities of this life and the next. I can no longer tell him, that sometimes, he cheered me up, sometimes he made me laugh hysterically and to this day, no one tells funnier stories. How can I tell him, that though I feared him, that I understood the broken man behind the anger, the human being who was my father.

The world does not have mercy, not on him, nor on me, so I must make the best of it. CTV asked for my childhood footage and now they lost it. So instead, I search for him in the rustling of trees and the fragrance of the lilacs that are abundant near the water-falls next door.

I feel almost alone in my grief. He wasn't the best father, but he was MY father, and that makes all the difference.

Much love,
Maria