Forest of Noise: Poems

by Mosab Abu Toha

“If you read books, you live more than one life.” Now I’m thirty and whenever I look at faces around me, old or young, on each forehead I read: “If you live in Gaza, you die several times.”

to have walls is a blessing

we take so so so much for granted

The forehead he’s wiping is a glittering, wrinkled map of the past.

Soon, Palestine will search for us, for our whispers, for our footsteps, our fading pictures fallen off blown-up walls.

Sorry, Death, but it was the eve of my twenty-second birthday and I had to be by the sea and listen to the lapping of waves, the sound I last heard before my birth.

The scars on our children’s faces will look for you. Our children’s amputated legs will run after you.

When we die, our souls leave our bodies, take with them everything they loved in our bedrooms: the perfume bottles, the makeup, the necklaces, and the pens. In Gaza, our bodies and rooms get crushed. Nothing remains for the soul. Even our souls, they get stuck under the rubble for weeks.

He’s wearing two watches, one set to the local time in New York, the other to Gaza’s.

Angel of death, When you collect the souls of those killed in an air strike, do you mind leaving a sign for us, so we know who is who?

she covers her kids’ eyes and loudly asks, What can you see when your eyes are closed? hoping her trembling voice may hide the bomb’s eradicating sound.

In the kitchen, the table is missing. In the house, the kitchen is missing. In the house, the house is missing. Only rubble stays, waiting for a sunrise.

The earth weeps. Though some fingers got cut, the dead young man still clutches in his hand a very old key—the only thing he’s inherited from his father. It’s the key to their house in Yaffa.

Before I sleep, Death is always sitting on my windowsill, whether in Gaza or Cairo.

I know she is dead, but everyone who sees us runs after us. You are alive for a moment, when living people run after you.

oh God 💔💔💔

To the souls who remain stuck under the rubble of their houses for weeks or blocked by clouds of smoke from continuing the journey.

To Gaza, I will continue to search for my books under your rubble, for my shadows in your bombed streets and fields of corn and strawberry, and for humanity in your razed graveyards.