a single breath
Yasmine Azzi

A caterpillar falls from the sky
Landing near my feet.
Still nestled in its cocoon of flesh and blood
Life and death at my feet.
What is a symbol, if not a tool for understanding the world?
Perhaps the caterpillar is a symbol for my own existence.
Guarded by my own privilege, academia,
I’m housed by a cocoon of entitlement
and a white-passing upper middle class veil that I wrap myself in before
taking the next leap.
Perhaps my culture is a symbol.
My mother tongue a symbol of ancestry fraught with violence and colonization
that somehow clung to the lips of those before me.
Passed on to my own, in a single
Breath.