The Stranger

The Stranger

No sun for him but memories, no ground beneath his feet but nostalgia.

He gazes through the windows of absence, at a homeland once called "home."

His steps are swallowed by the pavement, as if the earth does not know him, as if it asks, "Who are you?"

He walks with an aged moan in his heart, a torn map in his pocket, yearning for the shade of a palm tree, the scent of his mother’s bread, or the clamor of a neighbor who annoyed him out of love.

Every face that passes by is as foreign to him as he is to this planet; his eyes are ships without a harbor, his soul letters that have lost their way.

Son of silence when he screams, grandson of the earth when it disowns him, he has left the warmth of embraces, and the world’s cold has become his blanket.

Nothing comforts him but the echo of his voice in the alleys, nothing accompanies him but his stumbling shadow, another exile trailing behind.

He sleeps between walls that don’t remember his name, waking each morning to rewrite his history on a blank page, torn apart by the wind.

He walks without direction, without expectation, as if he were a body moving, his soul a refugee in the heart of the clouds.

The stranger may not be the one who left his homeland, but the one whose homeland left him.

He has become a language no one understands, a dialect that time stumbles over, suspended between a sky that doesn’t know him and an earth that doesn’t claim him. He carries his homeland in his eyes like a deferred tear, hides his people in his silence like a forbidden song.

He weeps for his family, not because they are gone, but because they are there, and he is here.

He weeps for the scent of his home, for walls that know how many tearful nights passed through their windows.

When he laughs, the laughter breaks—shattered by pain—between his lips, like a glass thrown from a balcony.

When he cries, washing himself with nostalgia, no one comes to say, “I am with you.”

O you who see him passing by, do not ask, “Where are you from?”

Instead, say, “Welcome, as if you were one of us.”

Perhaps those words will build him a homeland, even if only a fleeting one, in the heart.

He is the stranger!

All he owns is a poem written in his chest, each verse a homeland, each letter a mother waiting for him at the borders of time.