She is among poets a Mozart. 
        Always playful, forever joyful. 
        Beauty not only a virtue, 
               but an end unto itself. 

 Her sensibilities as delicate 
                   as a debutante’s cheeks.
        Her prose shimmers 
                   with overflowing ambitions.

 Her pride dominates the stage,
        like an aura of grace 
        struggling to hide its confidence.
        Begging the world to take a seat, 

                   not to miss the beginnings, 
                          discover stunning revelations. 
 So contagious are her pleas, 
        they require us to register 

                   her presence, as they humble her audience. 
 Like the serenity of light, 
        early morning,
                   as it lands on trees and their leaves,

 Her metaphors standing out 
        the way beautiful domes adorn 
                   long stained-glass walls 
                            of medieval churches. 

Trapped in thoughts like punctuations between sentences.
Yet certain my contributions will clear the air,

invite intriguing conversations with my fellow travelers
on this train ride, during my visit to Morocco, my first home.

They must have guessed I now live abroad,
am an outsider— my Gap shirt is too white.

As if doubly bleached,
plus it stands out in contrast to the colors around.

They will shortly conclude
I reside in an English speaking country,

for I will let escape the inevitable ok, the affirmative yeah,
and the convenient wow as I nod in agreement.

My Mother’s tongue buried deep somewhere.
Despite my careful selection of words,

I struggle to finish a thought.
Rusty as I am, I need warming up.

Outmatched and out of practice;
no matter my precautions, traces of rough

edges float in my speech, a betrayal.
I will come across as calculating, may be preaching.

They will inevitably ask: where are you visiting from?
America— immediately prompting eyebrows to rise.

A vacationer, a gringo. Will they dismiss my ideas?
Or pretend to be impressed?

Not really, they genuinely smile, and flood me with questions.

A puppeteer feels vibration,
echoing from the puppet
as it reacts to the dictated directions.

Mentoring is no different.

*

Claims to being the source of light,
from self-inflated egos,
are felt hardest on other self-inflated egos;

until darkness suffocates all.

*

When a dictator makes light of his ugly self,
or self-deprecates, it does not make him less evil,
and certainly not human.

In suffering, normalization is off-limits.

*

Sadness has enormous rings
that are forever expanding,
easily shared among the miserable.

Pain is contagious.