In damp cellars of Baba Amr, women and children huddle, waiting for the Arab Spring to arrive.
They are arrested emigrants on the road to freedom, now hostages to tyranny seeking asylum from a season of discontent lashing another poor generation cowering deep within the bowels of a crumbling city.
The hajis share the solace of desperation, pressing this wretched commune to haunt dark catacombs where collective hope takes refuge only to discover their dream of freedom lying in state waiting for a struck match to consume the decrepit effigy in a final funeral pyre.
The chill of winter moves through these poor pilgrims like a messenger of death.
An indifferent world has allowed the scrapes of the besieged to fester; growing into mortal wounds.
The grim reaper chuckles from a dark corner in these underground rooms.
He deeply inhales the exhilarating stench of death creeping in from the street, musing about its complementary qualities to the soiled rags robing colic infants.
Allah’s beloved are famished from the feast of acrimony playing out on the streets above them.
The hunger for peace dances on their tongues like the taste of a mocking Hors d'oeuvre for a starving man.
The wages of dissent, protests, the armed resistance of revolutionaries have led them to the shelter of this profane place.
Outside this god forsaken bivouac, the sounds of cold blades threshing insurgents have entered the city, moving with the facility of a frigid wind.
The terrible sword of a Baathist’s revenge eagerly slits the voices of dissent; silencing the last songs of an Arab Spring, once joyfully risen from the streets in a chorus of militant insistence, replaced by mournful dirges of horrific lament.
The realization that the promise of an Arab Spring will never arrive for some strikes winter in the heart of all.
Have our songs of liberation been nothing more then the baying of a starving dog begging for meat from a terrible master?
The dialog of gun battles on the street above have abated.
The soliloquy of grenade launchers have been silenced.
Partisans defending the city have left the streets.
The taste of recrimination will be the prize for those still remaining.
The sound of insurgents fleeing boots gives way to the pinch of hissing bayonets deflating the lungs of prostrate children kissing the dust of the streets that will entomb them.
Abandoned fighters too wounded to retreat face skyward to glimpse a last mortal vision of heaven from their beloved city; gargling final prayers from the bubbling blood of their slit throats.
It is time for the hoveled pilgrims to leave the dank basements of Homs.
Care must be taken as we travel the midnight roads, avoiding checkpoints; ducking into dark doorways to evade being caught in the headlights of passing cars.
We must remain invisible.
We must be one with the black midnight that swaddles us in darkness.
We will follow the trail well marked with the tears of Hama’s survivors.
We hear the whispers of unresolved vendettas leading to unrequited sanctuaries of revenge.
The last to exit Homs will follow our trail of tears as we trudge toward Mecca in search of our Arab Spring.
We pray that Allah will rendezvous with his tired wanderers there.