Forest of Noise: Poems

by Mosab Abu Toha

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.

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.”

The bomb when it pounded the sea made an eye socket beneath the sand. The fish thought the sea had been crying forever.

upon birth, mask up your children and leave them unnamed so the angel of death can’t find them

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.

A letter to my brother Hudayfah (2000–2016)

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?

You can lounge on a wicker chair near a pomegranate tree, where a canary never tires of singing.

Home, Jerusalem, the sea, Haifa, the rock, the oranges, the sand, the pigeon, Cairo, my mother, Beirut, books, the rock, the sea, the sea.

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

A father wakes up at night, sees the random colors on the walls drawn by his four-year-old daughter. The colors are about four feet high. Next year, they would be five. But the painter has died in an air strike.

1948 Nakba, the year when Israel was founded after expelling 800,000 Palestinians and destroying 530 villages

A Request After Refaat Alareer If I am going to die, let it be a clean death. No rubble over my corpse, no broken dishes or glasses, and not many cuts in my head or chest. Leave my ironed untouched jackets and pants in the closet, so I may wear some of them again at the funeral.

To My Mother, Staying in an UNRWA School Shelter in the Jabalia Camp I lost contact with my mother on December 2, 2023, while I was on my way to Egypt with my wife and three kids. I was able to hear my mother’s voice only after over a month.

No one is here anymore. Not even the sunset. In the kitchen, the table is missing. In the house, the kitchen is missing. In the house, the house is missing.