THREE PASSPORTS TO NOWHERE  

“We travel like other people, but we return to nowhere.”

—Mahmoud Darwish

My father carries three names, each stitched onto

a different passport, none leading home. He says the

wind is his brother, that a man can be many things

& still belong to nothing. When I was a child, he traced

the map of his journey on my palm—one line for the

blood that sings of cattle & endless green fields, one

for the tongue that holds the weight of markets &

calloused hands, & the other for the sun that darkened

his skin like a ripened millet. But which of these names

will remember him? At the border, the immigration

officer asks, where is your country? & my father swallows

air. What language can explain a history scattered like

millet husks in the wind? What country welcomes

a man who has forgotten the shape of his shadow?

He laughs, says, I am where my children speak my name.

But his children are lost in the echoes of his longing,

moving between cities that do not know them. Abusua

do firi, na ɛnyɛ akyi—family is like a forest: from the outside,

dense & whole, but within, each tree stands alone.

I dream of a home I have never touched, a place where

my father's footprints are still soft in the dust, where

his name is not a question but a song. But the sky does

not call us back, & the sea carries no letters for the exiled.

He carries countries in his bones.

He says, a man is not lost if his name still lingers somewhere,

but what of those whose names become air, carried only

in the mouths of ghosts? Some nights, I hear him whisper

in his sleep, calling names I do not know, places that exist

only in the soft ache of memory. He wakes before dawn,

stands by the window, watches the sky turn, as if waiting

for something—perhaps an old road to unfold beneath

his feet, perhaps the smell of home riding the wind.

But morning comes, & there is only silence, only another

day of walking through cities that ask for papers,

not names.