Two Cities Inside Me: New York and Damascus in an Exile's Mind

Written from exile, this poem sets New York and Damascus fighting inside the narrator's head: he lives in New York without inhabiting it, while Damascus, where he no longer lives, is the city that lives inside him. New York teaches him order, time and survival, with streets straight as geometric equations drawn by the ruler of capital and the pen of power, towers that are the result of an equation between land and market, and glass that reflects the city while nothing reflects in the soul. Damascus taught him meaning even when it was broken, a city of layers of time like an architectural manuscript, where shadow was the silent architect of narrow alleys and stone absorbed time until history became a building material. At night, when the noise of New York grows quiet, Damascus returns like an ancient idea that refused to die, a homeland that is an inner architecture and an invisible dome sheltering the soul wherever it goes. The poem ends with the conviction that the city that inhabits the soul cannot be demolished by wars or erased by distance.