Beneath the Olive Tree
Where My Childhood First Met Poetry I was only a child, in the hills of my beloved Lebanon, where olive trees were older than our stories, and life was measured in harvests, hardship, and love. I was meant to help my family, to gather olives from the earth, to fill the baskets with the little treasures that would become our bread, our warmth, our tomorrow. But I had a secret. High among the ancient branches, I would escape the weight of the day, wrap my little arms around the olive tree, rest my cheek against its weathered bark, and surrender to dreams while my family laboured below. They gathered olives. I gathered dreams. They listened for the fruit falling to the ground. I listened to the leaves whispering to the wind. And somewhere between the rustling branches and the Mediterranean sky, without knowing what poetry was, I had already begun to write it in my soul. The tree became my first storyteller, the wind, my first verse, and the silence between its leaves, my earliest le...