“… le dur désir de durer…”
–Paul Eluard
“You are my Hero”
Yes, that’s what I inscribed
In your copy of
The Book of Mev
No, I am not putting you on a pedestal
Proclaiming you a paragon
Who needs that?
Not me.
What I need from time to time
Is to look in your eyes
And see a radiant survivor
Someone still standing still feeling
For you
To live two years in Cairo
To endure eight hundred harassments and insults
To move in and out of those detention centers
To hear the stories of statelessness
(an unrecognized hell on earth)
To see irrefutable evidence of human indifference
and not finally shut down
To have your body sometimes “in”
but your heart and mind not “of” the rarefied world of academia
To recognize your hero
in a boy whom no one else cared for
To care for that one human being
stuck in multiple prisons at the same time
To recognize that what he needed was to look in your eyes
And see an ally, a friend, a sister, a human being still feeling
To become a pain-in-the-ass advocate
There in the kingdom of concrete and iron
You, who have lived intimately with affliction
You, a veteran of the long loneliness
You, seven times down
You, eight times up
You are my hero
