A Precious Past

05/11/2021

Stone and tree wind, uncaring and unaware, through the rubble and ash remains of yesterday's Beirut.

Boys dressed as men squabble over the bones of a country once teaming with atomic energy tested over several millennia.

Lebanon droops, spine curved, soul hanging loosely like an old garment weakened at the stitches and seams.

But she still lives, like the skin of an ancient, deliberately purposeful being whose patience far outpaces our perception.

That spirit of Lebanon, like the destitute man I saw rifling through street refuse for one more day, does not give inches so easily to the black storm hovering above its stolid visage.

Like the mighty cedars, who now struggle to breath in an ever hotter climate, Lebanon's roots fight to give the cracked beauty above the soil one more graceful, stuttering chance to reincarnate and replenish.