Casablanca the winter is over and I’m still here
After three quarters of a year

You handle so many contradictions with style 
I must admit
You’re not bad looking
From the right angles
Even beautiful
But you don’t hide your ugly sides well
I guess you can’t
Busy trying to cope with your own impatient cadence
And the constant arrival of people
Rich and poor
Mostly poor
Hoping for more
Biting smiling selling screaming 

Casablanca I’m caught in your hectic dance
Like any immigrant I’m ambivalent
Good days and bad
Today for a moment I broke out of you to notice the ocean
As I often have over the months
Still there
So much bigger deeper longer in its breaths
It could just take over and bust the whole place up
And sometimes it does strike a few blows
But mostly it respects the tiny shoreline boundary
Accepting
To remain a reminder for us
Of other cycles
Other scales of being

Anyway, Casablanca, I’m still here
Now watching your children clean beach chairs
Preparing for the summer
I haven’t taken you all in
You escape my rational mind traps
Too slow for you
I have no choice but to return to poetry
To know you 

I’ve got to tell you I see a lot of violence
Barbarians everywhere
At least it seems to me that’s how you treat them 
They are hungry Casablanca
And speak the languages of your ancestors
Your own deep thoughts use the same North African tongues
No matter how much French you use
And how many monuments you keep to praise the invaders your forefathers kicked out
Just a few decades ago
You are so colonial—it really upsets me—I don’t know whether to scream or cry
But who am I?
After all when my life broke down in Canada
You welcomed me a refugee and have treated me hospitably ever since
I came to you like so many others with ambitions and aspirations
I must really try to be helpful
Because you, Casablanca, and cities like you
Probably hold the future of humanity within your ever-expanding bosoms
Here is where we make it or break it
All or nothing
Casablanca you are exciting
I think I’ll stay a while
Inshallah

Morocco you're killing me with springtime colours

Like foam overflowing from a milky coffee

Sweet

The flowers abundant over the walls of buildings all around the Casablanca café

And people bursting into a variety of styles

Then on the train to El Jadida all across the fields

Ya Allah!

The fields