Vaterland | a poem

I cannot go home

I cannot return

I started a war when

I wanted to end it

but the ghosts followed me

eating away at my body

calling me home

I missed life where I came from

missed landscapes and faces and odours

lost in the world

I abandoned the heat

the colours on my skin

the seas that I considered a part of me

I fled to a country that seemed to welcome me

in a reduced form

in a form robotic

in a form exhausted and exploited

I’m dying in this country

that doesn’t feel like my own

but I’ll stay here

because this is where my son chose death

I stay here because I cannot move

I stay here because I’ve done nothing else but mourn