Father’s Myth

My dad tunes the radio to a news station.
On the floor, I sit to do homework.
I’m in second grade.
My mother has been at Al-Nasr Children’s Hospital
for three days.
My sister Asma’ feels sick.
Asma’ means names.
(She is dead now
but parents still give
names to their newborns.)

I was born in a refugee camp.

Our house is roofed with corrugated
tin sheets. Alleys in the neighborhood
too narrow for a father and a son
to walk beside each other.

My father once warned me,
If you dirty your clothes,
the sky will pour all its rain over you.
You’ll become too sick to play outside for weeks.

One day, I play marbles with friends in the street.
I lose a game but refuse to give
my marbles away.
I flee down the bumpy, potholed roads,

trip over a stone other children used
as a goalpost. I dirty my clothes
with dust and mud.

I look up into the sky:
barely any clouds.
I arrive home, lunch on the table,
the same table I use to do homework.

Then—
a surprise storm tears open the sky;
the water tank on our roof
skids off its cinder blocks,
pounding the tin sheets.
It gets stuck between two metal rafters.

No one is harmed.
But the water pours
over me and my lunch
and my backpack.

The teakettle on the stove whistles
and my father smiles. He glances at my clothes,
wet mud as brown as my feet.

Later, friends outside call me
to play another game.