In short
A short prose poem on exile held in the body: the siren that sounds in the cells, generations who packed quickly, and the question of how a people learns to rest once it has come home. It is a literary piece rather than an explainer.
We are a people who have never fully known home.
Or maybe once, we did.
And ever since, we have been remembering it.
Perhaps that is why every siren does not only sound in the street — it sounds in the body. It awakens something ancient, buried deep in our cells:
The threat.
The fleeing.
The exile.
The leaving in haste.
Generations of mothers who packed quickly.
Fathers who looked over their shoulders.
Children who learned too early that safety could vanish overnight.
A terror with no beginning.
A knowing the body remembers even when the mind cannot name it.
I write this and my eyes fill with tears, because my body knows this story is true.
Because beneath the nervous system of exile, there has always been one pulse, one direction, one holy homesickness:
Jerusalem.
We have always longed for her.
Three times a day, we turned toward her.
Prayed for her.
To be in her.
To return to her.
To be held by her.
But what does that do to a people— to tell the body for thousands of years:
not yet.
not here.
not home.
And so I wonder:
How do we surrender? How do we let the body soften? How do we feel safe enough to belong?
How do we shake off three thousand years of wandering?
How do we release exile from the cells, from the nervous system, from the soul?
How do we let ourselves rest when so much of us still does not believe it is safe to?
How do we learn, at last, that we are allowed to be home?
Written by Yarin Weltsman (Queen Yarin)
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