Oh People Of The Tent

Photo by Mohammad Al-Sawalhi

UPDATED — December 11th, 2025

Oh people of the tent, you wake to rain gnawing at your feet, to puddles collecting the night’s cold breath. They say rain is a blessing but here it sounds like a verdict. You wake in mud because someone decided you didn’t deserve floors. You queue for bread because someone decided your hunger was strategic. You bury your dead in pieces because someone decided your grief takes up too much space. They call you displaced, as if a storm swept you here, as if tents sprout naturally from razed neighborhoods, from bulldozed homes, from the bureaucratic cruelty that scripts your days. x2

This isn't an accident, or tragedy of weather, but a world arranged so that your sleepless nights guarantee someone else’s comfort. Your deprivation is engineered, your suffering is policy, your calamity has been made into the world’s logic, rationalized and folded into the everyday until no one flinches, and the worst truth of all, those of us with walls and roofs live inside the architecture that crushes you, even when we claim to mourn you.

Oh people of the tent, they say your existence barely registers, for its become a smudge in the calculus of the global order. They imagine you scatterable, erasable, killable, that your very shadow is an inconvenience to their maps. They tell you the cold is your own doing, and that your children shiver because you refused to unroot yourselves on command. They put you inshelters designed to be lifted and removed, because permanence from you is a threat -- for your foundations imply a future, and futures are what they mean to confiscate. And still they ask why you cannot be modern, why you cannot step across the tidy threshold of displacement like those of us who surrendered land for comfort. To them, you are disposable precisely because you insist on belonging insist on self determination.

O people of the tent, you hold on to self determination with a grip the world pretends not to see. ******************* *****************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************.

O people of the tent, you will return. And when you do, maybe the tent will tell the world that it was never a permanent dwelling, but a pause forced upon a people who never stopped belonging to the ground beneath their feet.