By Ramzi Albert Rihani
Fear hides in the eucalyptus tree
That dwindles to the sound of silence.
Unheard screams pierce the soul.
Everything becomes mute
Memory, earlier than silence
Assembles itself, standing tall,
To tell the story of past shrieks.
We chase the ghost of the wishing well
Incessantly trying to catch it
With bare hands, it slips like mercury in a tempest
Mocking the memory of the beast
The ghost wrote a poem
And sprinkled it over the river
As if to make it holy
Not knowing it became a memory
We catch the memory and set it free
Like a bird out of a cage.
We collect our remains
To become holy again,
Free again,
Alive again,
And soar high through the heart of the storm.
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Ramzi Albert Rihani is a Lebanese American author. His poems have appeared in several publications in the US, Canada, and the UK. He received the 2024 Polk Street Review first-place poetry award. He is a published music critic and wrote and published a travel book The Other Color - a Trip Around the World in Six Months (FMA Press, 198). Ramzi lives in the Washington, DC area.