What is Home?

What is home?

Without the memories you hold

The feelings they evoke

When you get a whiff of your past

What is home?

Does it welcome you

With open arms

As open as your heart

What is home?

Does it stay the same

Without you in it

What is home?

What makes it what it is

When it’s no longer what it was

What is home?

Without you in it

My future and my past

What is home

But a place in my heart

Where people I love meet

Who had never met before

What is home?

When you’re a visitor

To what should be your native land

What is home?

That was stolen so violently from me before

Then gently returned

Only to be released again

What is home?

** This poem was written on a sleepless night my first trip back to Kuwait since 2002. I came back to Kuwait, my birthplace, and I am enjoying being back, but feeling the emptiness of being here without my late father. I have never been here without him and walking on these streets without him has been… hard. It is also strange to be here without my daughter, traveling without her for the first time on a trip longer than a day… and wishing she was here to share it with me. It’s been a really emotional experience…and I can’t sleep. I can’t sleep.