“Hand Watches”
I opened the drawer where I store old keepsakes and tokens. My eyes paused on hand watches with dead batteries, frozen in time…

Gifts from teachers and friends— offered to honor my accomplishments, to praise my respect for time.

It never occurred to them, or to me, that Time could die of a heart attack— that it would cease to matter the day my homeland was occupied and destroyed.

The day the plunderers —both foreign and within— colluded to burn and erase all that was beautiful.

Since then, I’ve refused to wear hand watches, and I never will until my people reclaim their Time and dignity.

And when that day comes, Time will no longer matter. For then, I will become— a butterfly, a sparrow, a daffodil or an orange blossom, perhaps an apricot blossom on a branch, an unstoppable stream of water flowing beyond time and timing.

In that same drawer, I found pens that had run dry, like mummified corpses.

In a moment of despair, a lightning bolt of realization struck me— leaving behind a terrifying question:
What if this is a wound that no amount of time can heal— a cause so vast that all the world’s ink cannot write its cure?”