Ella Ma Temro’ Nasmi - A Breeze Cannot But Pass

Downhill uphill. Footstep’s strike, a percussion of memoirs 
to the rhythm of a hiker’s metabolic rate in July sun.
Heat. Hair thickens into wool, broomstick bristles. 

A breeze would always pass by to comb those strands, 
sprouted from a scalp made on this very route. Inside, like outside, 
is a garden. Everything here has its roots. 

We water them so our days can prosper 
like those Geraniums in red waves 
from old milk tins. Tatra. Regilait. Nido. 

Maa Nido Rebyo el Wlad. We inhale the 
breath of cyclamens, coffee moves into the scent 
of their Rubiaceae relatives dropped on the ground, 

like touch on a jasmine trail. In one briny olive 
at the breakfast table, I taste my sister’s longing. 
Diaspora. Locked in lands incomprehensible as thought.
 
Caramelized onions-- I remember they were once raw 
and tear-inducing. A breeze cannot but pass to cool 
the wounds where paths close. 

* Children grew up with Nido.

Artist Statement

In the wake of displacement, what lingers are fragments—sensory echoes, ancestral textures, and the weight of inherited longing. “Ella Ma Temro’ Nasmi (A Breeze Cannot But Pass)” is a poetic response to the aftermaths of diaspora, generational memory, and identity dislocation. Through images of hill-walks, kitchen aromas, and childhood containers repurposed into flowerpots, the poem traces an invisible architecture of belonging—one built from the overlooked, the domestic, and the seasonal.

This piece draws on personal and collective memory from Lebanon, where objects and landscapes become vessels of emotion and history. A breeze combing through sun-thickened hair is not merely meteorological; it is symbolic of the fleeting moments that cool wounds after rupture. After the upheaval of migration or political strife, what remains are everyday relics that carry home within them: Nido tins flowering with geraniums, the scent of ground coffee blending with jasmines, and olives that taste of longing across borders.

The poem inhabits the emotional terrain where grief meets ritual, where even caramelized onions recall the sharpness of what came before. The breeze—gentle, inevitable—becomes a metaphor for time’s passage and the quiet endurance of those carrying memory in their bodies. In this way, “Ella Ma Temro’ Nasmi” becomes not just a reflection on aftermaths, but a testimony to the quiet resilience that follows: how we gather what’s left and find life still blooming in the cracks.