Forest of Noise: Poems

by Mosab Abu Toha

I was seven: decades younger than war, a few years older than bombs.

To my shadow that wishes to go to school with the children of morning, but couldn’t fit through the classroom doors.

At fifth grade, I visit the school library. On a wall by the door, a poster claims, “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.”

a stone near a cemetery suggests why give birth to children at all

I still have dreams about running for miles and miles with no border blocking my feet, with no unexploded bombs scaring me off.

I dream still about my grandfather, how much I want to pick oranges with him in Yaffa. But my grandfather died, Yaffa is occupied, and oranges no longer grow in his weeping groves.

Every time we hear a bomb falling from an F-16 or an F-35, our lives panic. Our lives freeze somewhere in between, confused where to head next: a graveyard, a hospital, a nightmare.

In the refugee camp, where land is strewn with debris, where air chokes with rage, my harvest is yet to arrive, my seeds only sprout on this page.

But of all things, losing the only photo of my grandfather under the rubble of my house was a real disaster.

Now it’s 2024, and the cemetery you were buried in was razed by Israeli bulldozers and tanks. How can I find you now? Will my bones find yours after I die?

I leave the door to my room open, so the words in my books, the titles, and names of authors and publishers, could flee when they hear the bombs.

Where should people go? Should they build a big ladder and go up? But heaven has been blocked by the drones and F-16s and the smoke of death.

I’m nameless for the first time. I’m stateless for a long time.

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?

I wish there were no planes at all. I wish there were no war. I wish we never had to wish.

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.