As a babe, I wore my father’s Moroccan lullabies like a winter Amazigh cloak,
my mother’s warm smile bent her eyes to mine like tide returning to shore.
I was guarded in their embrace from the worst of what the world spoke,
before antisemitism and Islamophobia learned how to settle at my door.
As a child of my time, hateful forces were already long there, held at bay,
though they still moved in quiet, thinning air.
My parents stood between me and the sharpest edges of their sway,
so I first knew the world through love, not through its crueler glare.
But I am now the adult my parents’ Jewish–Muslim love has made,
though the world still fractures and the air grows harder to breathe.
I was raised on firmer ground, and I will not be swayed,
so I stand where old hatreds sharpen—and will not be pulled beneath.
I learned to trace the fault-lines hidden in an inherited light,
to walk through corridors of rumor where certainty unthreads,
to sift the quiet fractures that settle just beyond sight,
and hold my ground in language where distortion confidently spreads.
My father has now returned to the One who gathers every soul like dawn returns to prayer,
yet his voice still lingers, a song that roots itself beyond forgetting.
My mother grows fainter where she once made me strong, and still I move through the story they laid in care,
held by what they built in me—truth and love braided through all they were begetting.
