I Can Only Wonder

If we are always foreigners when one 

of us walks across the Pont de Sully

[what is then foreigner?] 

I can only wonder 

It is not the color 

the sun gave us,

a hue can’t 

be a foreigner,

and the sun can’t 

make someone 

become a foreigner.

I can only wonder 

Is it something that emerges from 

our dark pupils while we 

contemplate their strange buildings,

as if each of those constructions was

a tiny piece of the labyrinthine puzzle 

that they stubbornly call “city”? 

I can only wonder

But don’t pay much attention to my words,

it is only my [our] wandering soliloquy,

a conversations that I have with a wave 

of borrowed voices that aren’t mine. 

Because when I think about home

a soft whisper invades my memory

and I imagine that back in Essaouira

there is someone sitting at a table 

awaiting my arrival to have dinner

while we talk about the years I spent abroad

seeking for an alley that I couldn’t find. 

I can only wonder 

Because a Parisian attic has nothing in common with the undulant floating of a fishing boat amidst the Atlantic Ocean, and as I keep walking through the labyrinthine streets of this endless city, where people are so proud of a tower with flickering lights, I can’t avoid pondering [while I look at the top of that famous tower] that “a poet living in an attic has nothing in common with a fisherman pulling with his arms the heavy fishing net with the catch of the day: [sardines] [mostly sardines] [only sardines].

And Paris [where you/he/she and I/We/Us are always foreigners] has nothing in common with a camel carrying tourists alongside the Moroccan shores while a few blonde young men practice windsurfing as if that ocean was their own garden.

And each night [before I turn off the lights of my rented room] when a voice from the other side of the Gibraltar Strait whispers straight into my ear that the catch of the day was better than the day before and that a plate of dried dates is still waiting for me on the table, I can only wonder, as if the voice was still whispering inside my ear, that life down there [in the Maghreb] is also a gift from god.

Inshallah” 

[is all I hear while I’m immersed in total darkness]

[in a rented room]

[in a land that is foreign because the wind blows like a jab in the stomach]

and all I can think about is if that table will be there the day I return to the place I call [home].

Inshallah” 

[but what does that mean while I’m 

immersed in this foreign darkness?]

I can only wonder