The Gate
Left is for the adventurous. Right is for the tame.
We have a gate, it's preposterous. It's just there for the name.
Come inside. Look around you. Many've been here before.
It's not their fault, though. We just let them. We sport an open door.
In this house we love dearly, we let all roam around
They come in, we take absence, and look for foreign ground
It's our pride, our way of living, giving ourselves away
Homes and roots, do we need them? They're no reason to stay
So welcome stranger, take our land, just take it all, for free
In a short while, we'll all be leaving, leaving it all to thee.
posted by Fouad at 11:58 PM
6 Comments:
Fouad,
the picture shook me hard. I feel so guilty for leaving. The gate is the exact design for my grandparents's big house "3amra" in my village in Nabatieh. if it's green, it would have been the exact same. The house was demolished a year ago. That day I felt I lost something inside me.
Your post, made me tear. No....there is a reason for them to stay. Our memories, identities, who we are, and the way we lived....and even if we left, I had the warm feeling knowing they stayed there....standing the years...
no body is to take my land, my memories, and my small things I left behind.
oh...I wish I didn't leave....:(
I should have known better....
as long as you go back one day.. the land will always be there and our memories will live and forgive :)
I love it. not the leaving part, but the welcoming-stranger part.
One goes back, one hundred don't. And even if we return, after so many years have passed, will we still recognize the land and the people we've forsaken? will we want to stay or will we itch to come back to the land of Walmart and McDonald's?
Fouad,
Stop! you are killing me!
I love the way this picture is framed, the way the buildings encroach on the garden, the tilt of the gate. Life is a continual wrestle between self and 'we', isn't it? Wanting different selves and different communities, struggling to understand connections between the two. And home is that elusive essential, clutched as earth yet continually abstract...
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