Test on Identity and other poems.

From Thetacursed on Pinterest.

1. What is the weight of a name lost in translation?

a) A letter swallowed by the wind.

b) The echo of a mother’s voice fading at the border.

c) The silence between two unfamiliar tongues.

d) All of the above.

2. Define Home in your own words:

a) A place you return to but never recognize.

b) The smell of rain on the soil you no longer own.

c) The memory of a door closed behind you.

d) All of the above.

3. Fill in the blank:

To be displaced is to ________.

a) Become a ghost in your own skin.

b) Carry the ocean inside your chest.

c) Speak in a language no one can hear.

d) None of the above. Try again.

4. Which of the following best describes Exile?

a) A bird with clipped wings dreaming of flight.

b) A suitcase full of photographs you’ve forgotten.

c) A passport stamped with loss.

d) The space between here & nowhere.

5. Essay Question:

a) Write about the meaning of Belonging in 250 words or less.

Show your work.

b) Include examples of places you’ve never been but call your own.

c) Include the names of people you’ve lost,

and those you’ve never met but feel in your bones.

From Birmingham Museum Trust on Unsplash.

Instructions for Becoming a Homeland

1. Take a city and break it into syllables.

I/ba/dan.

Let them roll on your tongue like a confession.

2. Find the stories your grandmother buried

between the walls of her silence.

Translate them into the language of salt and dust.

3. Write your name in Arabic,

ميكائيل (Mīkāʾīl),

even if your hand hesitates at the letters.

Even if you cannot bend the ق like your uncle does.

Even if the ink smudges like a memory half-formed.

4. Carry the map of exile in your bones.

Let the streets curve in your ribcage.

Let the borders soften under your skin.

Let your body become a place where history lingers.

5. One day, a stranger will ask you where you are from.

Do not answer with geography.

Say: I am made of the places that no longer exist.

6. Say: I am my mother’s hands, threading grief into gold.

Say: I am the river, and the river is me.

From Paul Vaulkmar on Unsplash.

Mogrify

A preacher glides down my street,

his voice a gentle harmattan whisper,

telling of a woman who learned to

transmute her grief into soft fur,

her sorrow into the sleek shape of a cat.

In my hometown, cats are omens,

delicate prayers murmured too near to sin.

My mother, her hands forever warm with the

scent of soup and freshly baked bread, taught me

to nourish every fragile life, to feed the living

and the aching, no matter the form they assume.

At night, when the clatter of pots fades into a soft murmur,

I watch her—the cat with hunger like an old lullaby,

her eyes holding the weight of a thousand quiet longings.

She laps up the remnants of our kindness, each tender

sip a memory of what it means to be whole. In return,

I offer a small grace: a grain of my mother’s enduring patience,

a gentle spoonful of love, a hope that in the quiet dusk,

this will be enough. Two days past, my neighbor whispered

of a dead cat on the street; yet in the dim light, I saw not death

but a soft exodus—a body that once craved the rawness of life,

now serenely at peace, an empty house where the spirit once danced.