When red apple roses rise from my head,
Know that the earth has embraced me, now dead.
I'll rest where roots wrap my bones in the ground,
And bloom through my silence, no longer bound.

Their petals still whisper the things I once said;
In death, I will part with the cage of my heart.
So grieve in my garden, but know it’s my home,
For beauty will grow where my love ever roams.

Watching the sun go down
Watching the sun come up
Seeing people move on
Seeing life go on
Watching my life go down
Like the last ship sinking, unseen and uncalled for

Nobody even seems to know I'm out here
Not a flare not a static on the radio
No surface or land in sight just
Me and my mind
A silent rising tide
Drifting afar towards the nothing
Just away

I wonder what more the world will see
The best went by, the worst may be.
A child with toy cries out in plea
As war burns down his sheltering tree.

He asks his toy, innocently:
“What made the sky fall silently?”
He looks around, helplessly,
Then screams in pain, so desperately.

“Who brought the war to burn my tree?
Why does the world watch silently?
Who chained their hands from helping me?
If I could speak what I wished for me
To see the world live peacefully.”

But now I know the world I see
Was never really made for me.
It’s made for those who close their eyes
For those who scroll while someone dies.

In Gaza’s hush, the night ignites,
With fire that falls from foreign heights.
No lullabies, no peaceful skies
Just sirens' wail and mothers’ cries.

The olive trees, once full of grace,
Now bleed in every sacred place.
A child clutches a broken toy,
Still searching for a taste of joy.

Walls close in where hope once grew,
Beneath the dust, the sky turns blue
But no one looks, or dares to see
The lives erased so brutally.

The sea is near, but not for play,
It mirrors smoke by light of day.
And prayers rise up through shattered glass,
For peace to come, for war to pass.

O world that watches, cold and still,
Why must the blood of dreams be spilled?
How loud must grief begin to scream
Before you fight for more than dreams?

In Gaza’s heart, they still resist
Each breath they draw is a quiet fist.
And even when the nights are long,
They sing the truth in trembling song:

“We are not rubble, we are the roots,
We are the echoes in the flutes.
We are the dawn you’ll one day see
A people’s pain, a people free.

If you can’t hold on others secrets with you, better stop listening to them.

i keep looking
for the meaning
in small things --
like in the way she says
my name,
somehow it sounds
so right.
or how silence
still answers me.

If you think noise is loud
You haven’t been around silence enough