Today I mourn myself.
Ashes in the moonlight.
Once, I met myself
with a red suitcase.
My destiny; escape or a blade.
Today would be too late.
I begged them No. But darling,
they said you’d be good to me.
Diamond ring and baby’s crib.
Yet misery was born
in the cracks of my brain.
The leaf grown on our day, now
buried under weeping rivers.
To the river I dragged my
bare feet till I reached the
leaves and slept for eternity.
Nour Al Ghraowi is an MFA student at Texas State University, pursuing a Creative Writing degree in poetry. She was born and raised in Damascus, Syria, and this information is important when reading her work. In many of her poems, she focuses on the unheard voices of Arab women, and how they are often silenced by men or the world in general. Being an Arab woman from the Middle East, she has come across men who mock her accent or the way she pronounces things, and therefore, part of her writing is also about the Arabic language and how it is perceived in the western world.