I am a tree...

I am a tree—my roots sunk deep into foreign soil. My branches play with a foreign wind. I reach toward a foreign sun and try to find joy in foreign seasons.

My roots bleed in this earth. I’ve tried for so long to take hold here that I no longer know whether it is welcoming or not—whether it is fertile or just made of stones, whether its rains are nourishing or mercilessly cruel, whether its sun shines with warmth or glares with bitter irony.

My roots bleed in this soil that is not my own. Its ground does not suit me. It longs for the plains from which it was once painfully torn. It yearns for that diamond morning dew, when the rising summer sun would stroke my branches with tenderness, and the evening glow would always lull me to sleep with wind-born lullabies.

I remember that distant land in my dreams. I weep without tears. I moan without words. I complain in silence, my lips unmoving, my heart pierced by the arrow of longing.

My roots bleed in this foreign, stony ground. The harsh wind offers me no comfort, nor does the obsequious rain that drenches me, nor the ashamed sun hiding behind its curtain of clouds.

My roots bleed in this stranger land—the one I once chose, as if painting it myself in shades of sorrow.

I stir my roots; they bleed, which means they never took hold. They cry out for their native forests, for the moss-covered valleys, for the clearings scented with early wild strawberries.

I am a tree—uprooted and replanted in the wrong soil, my branches stretching not toward the sun but back toward the land where my roots belong.