Forest of Noise: Poems

by Mosab Abu Toha

To my shadow that’s been waiting for my return, homeless except when I was walking by its side in the summer light.

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.”

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

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.

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.

When I read the poem to you and ask, What do you think? You say, It’s beautiful, though you know that frustrates me. Beautiful is not enough, not next to you, not next to the poem. I’m asking you about what makes my poem a poem, just like when you ask me what makes you my love:

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