Forest of Noise: Poems

by Mosab Abu Toha

Poetry is not a luxury. —Audre Lorde

Every child in Gaza is me. Every mother and father is me. Every house is my heart. Every tree is my leg. Every plant is my arm. Every flower is my eye. Every hole in the earth is my wound.

To my shadow that’s been crushed by cars and vans, its chest pierced by shrapnel and bullets flying with no wings, my shadow that no one’s attending to, bleeding black blood through its memory now, and forever.

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.”

She asked her teacher: If there are four directions, then why do we have only two feet?

upon birth, mask up your children and leave them unnamed so the angel of death can’t find them someone may ask why not paint their faces change their names every day a nightingale on the tree of dusk exclaims what if both the painter and the paint work for the angel of death a stone near a cemetery suggests why give birth to children at all

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.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master. —Elizabeth Bishop

I’ve personally lost three friends to war, a city to darkness, and a language to fear. This was not easy to survive, but survival proved necessary to master. But of all things, losing the only photo of my grandfather under the rubble of my house was a real disaster.

When a child is born, we feel sad for him or her. A child is born here to suffer, sir!

Sir, we are not welcome anywhere. Only cemeteries don’t mind our bodies. We no longer look for Palestine. Our time is spent dying. Soon, Palestine will search for us, for our whispers, for our footsteps, our fading pictures fallen off blown-up walls.

Your sight was so fresh and sharp that I felt you could see through me, into my bleeding past. I am crying, but my tears are cold. Tears are falling on my feet, they burn the tiny, dark hairs on my toes. My feet are bare. I have been walking for a long time, and the road is strewn with the remains of my grandfather’s bombed grave.

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?

What are you thinking? What thinking? What you? You? Is there still you? You there? 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.

In Gaza, our bodies and rooms get crushed. Nothing remains for the soul. Even our souls, they get stuck under the rubble for weeks.

Our neighbors sold their house. They loaded their furniture and books onto a truck, but left the portrait of their grandfather hanging on the living room wall. I asked the old wheelchaired man, “Why did you do that?” He said, “If we removed it, the whole house would crumble.”

What a Gazan Should Do During an Israeli Air Strike Turn off the lights in every room / sit in the inner hallway of the house / away from the windows / stay away from the stove / stop thinking about making black tea / have a bottle of water nearby / big enough to cool down / children’s fear / get a child’s kindergarten backpack and stuff / tiny toys and whatever amount of money there is / and the ID cards / and photos of late grandparents, aunts, or uncles / and the grandparents’ wedding invitation that’s been kept for a long time / and if you are a farmer, you should put some strawberry seeds / in one pocket / and some soil from / the balcony flowerpot in the other / and hold on tight / to whatever number there was / on the cake / from the last birthday.

Guns pointed at me. A gust of wind. The tank behind. Artillery shelling in the distance. Drop your boy, drop everything! I’m not a thing, I will not drop myself.

On your knees! Interrogation. Two hours later a soldier in English says, We are sorry about the mistake. You are going back to Gaza on your knees.

A car slides on our asphalt street, like an iron running on an ironing board. But in my city, streets are never flat. Potholes from bombs are everywhere, like crows’ nests in a forest of noise.

I become grass in America, if you want me, look for me under your boot-soles. I become a child in Gaza, if you want me, look for me under the rubble of our house.

I wish I had a rescue plane to fly over Gaza to drop wheat flour and tea bags, tomatoes and cucumbers, to remove the rubble of the houses, to retrieve the corpses of my loved ones. I wish for a second rescue plane to drop flowers for children— the ones still alive—to plant on the graves of their parents and siblings in the streets or schoolyards. The wish behind the wish? I wish there were no planes at all. I wish there were no war. I wish we never had to wish.

The ceiling of my bedroom, my fridge and the stale bread in it, the notebook inside which I hid the love letters from my wife before we married, the foreign coins in my piggy bank, my expired debit cards and my brother’s death certificate, little pieces of shrapnel in or near each of these.