Wanderings Through Unwritten Thoughts
written by: Nizar F. Hermes
Now I wander through unwritten thoughts,
heavy with lost memories.
I approach, letter by letter,
word by word,
meanings that have long slipped away.
And when I arrive,
I find only a metaphorical lifeline
to escape the horrors of cruel worlds.
Behind me, the alleys of a capricious childhood
twist like suffocating smoke
in the sky of a slowly dying city.
The scent of my grandmother’s couscous
still lingers in the air,
like her spirit—
refusing to vanish in the cities of forgetting.
In exile, silence carries a strange accent.
The wind touches with a brutal hand.
Thoughts sharpen,
confusing even the clearest meaning.
And pain, a wound unhealed,
despite an abundance of remedies.
Between here and there,
memory takes hold.
I do not write to say,
I do not write to declare,
but to return.
Excruciating thoughts,
inked in darkness that never dries,
resurrect me on scattered pages,
across the folds of distant maps.
I resist the pull of fading.
I crawl across the bastions of oblivion.
I breathe in the scent of a childhood that will not return.
I watch the phantom of a grandmother
who resides in absence.
And I weep,
for the memory of a homeland
I left behind,
recklessly,
in the uncertainty of youth.
- Wanderings Through Unwritten Thoughts - May 28, 2025
