“I Know I Will Never Meet Them”
I know
I will never meet
the Iranian Jews
nor the Kurdish Jews.
They live
in dust-laced echoes,
in stories folded away
like embroidered cloth
no one wears anymore.
They were the neighbors
we were not allowed to know,
the prayers
we never learned to answer,
the candles
we watched from across the street
but never dared to touch.
I search for them
in names,
in ruins,
in DNA that stutters
through old empires.
But they are already
too far gone—
to Brooklyn,
to Haifa,
to silence.
They will not come back
to the mountains
nor the valleys
that once heard their footsteps.
I know
I will never meet them.
Not in this life.
Not in these borders.
But sometimes,
when I walk alone
and the wind forgets itself,
I hear a lullaby
with no homeland—
and I know
they were real.