Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear: Poems from Gaza

by Mosab Abu Toha

“Am” is the linking verb that follows “I” in the present tense when I am no longer present, when I’m shattered.

A book that doesn’t mention my language or my country, and has maps of every place except for my birthplace, as if I were an illegitimate child on Mother Earth. Borders are those invented lines drawn with ash on maps and sewn into the ground by bullets.

Its flag has no room to fly freely, but there is space on the coffins of my countrymen.

plays are still performed in Gaza. Gaza is the stage.

the email through which I smelled overseas air.

I wake up ill when gloomy ideas about what might’ve happened to me come in my dreams, what if I had stopped for a few seconds at the window when a bullet from nowhere ripped through the glass.

I speak Arabic and English, but I don’t know in what language my fate is written. I’m not sure if that would change anything.

My grandmother, Khadra, tried to take some oranges with her in 1948, but the shelling was heavy. The oranges fell on the ground, the earth drank their juice. It was sweet, I’m sure.

Al-Quds is Arabic for Jerusalem. I have never been to al-Quds. It’s around 60 miles from Gaza. People who live 5,000 miles away can move there, while I cannot even visit.

I like to go to the beach and watch the sun as it sinks into the sea. She’s going to shine on nicer places, I think to myself.

Once he saw a swarm of clouds. He shouted, “Dad, some bombs. Watch out!” He thought the clouds were bomb smoke. Even nature confuses us.

What a huge country America is, I thought. Why did Zionists occupy Palestine and still build settlements and kill us in Gaza and the West Bank? Why don’t they live here in America? Why can’t we come here to live and work?

In Gaza, you can find a man planting a rose in the hollow space of an unexploded tank shell, using it as a vase.

I hated death, but I hated life, too, when we had to walk to our drawn-out death, reciting our never-ending ode.

My grandfather was a terrorist— He departed his house, leaving it for the coming guests, left some water on the table, his best, lest the guests die of thirst after their conquest.

It might disturb visitors from abroad.

for this home i shall not draw boundaries no punctuation marks

Children learn their numbers best when they can count how many homes or schools were destroyed, how many mothers and fathers were wounded or thrown into jail.

Like a woman hanging her laundry on the clothesline, I hang my words on the lines of my page.

The sun sets behind the eyelid.

All around me are nothing but silent walls and people sobbing without sound.

Angels get hold of my infant niece. We look around and find only her milk bottle.

For us, the fear of dying before living haunts us while we are still in our mothers’ wombs.

imagining the wall shouting to the clock, “Stop ticking! You’re hurting my ears.”

In Gaza, some of us cannot completely die. Every time a bomb falls, every time shrapnel hits our graves, every time the rubble piles up on our heads, we are awakened from our temporary death.

Porlock

IT IS ONE LAND! For those who are standing on the other side shooting at us, spitting on us, how long can you stand there, fenced by hate? Are you going to keep your black glasses on until you’re unable to put them down?

Even the broadcaster felt the pain when the radio was hit.

We didn’t hear the F-16s until they finished their strikes. They descended from the inferno. Dante hadn’t mentioned them.

We hurried to the radio, that old, dirty box that usually vomits blood and body parts into our ears, hospitals full of burning wounds, moans, a corpse, and a girl missing her leg, lying on a cot or a bloody floor.

The houses were not Hamas. The kids were not Hamas. Their clothes and toys were not Hamas. The neighborhood was not Hamas. The air was not Hamas. Our ears were not Hamas. Our eyes were not Hamas. The one who ordered the killing, the one who pressed the button thought only of Hamas.

My science teacher never taught us how a nail bomb works. It wasn’t part of his class. My poor teacher, no one came to rescue him. Dear teacher, did you know that after your burial, the Israelis killed five of your family in the cemetery? They didn’t like how you were buried, it seems, and hoped your family could improve with practice.

Even the pens wanted to write about what they heard, what shook them when they were napping in the early afternoon.

It’s been noisy for a long time and I’ve been looking for a recording of silence to play on my old headphones.

Though we all have very different stories, as Palestinians our stories are the same in many ways. I think it’s like we are living in a grave: we are not dead, we are going about our daily business, but in a grave. We are living in place of a dead person. I know that’s contradictory.

when I was 12, that was the first time I could sense the movement of Israeli tanks, a few hundred meters from our house. We didn’t know whether we should just keep quiet: What if they hear us? When you are in danger, you imagine yourself to be the only target on planet Earth.

The many books resting on the shelves of my professors were just lying under the rubble of the building. The first book that I could extract was the Norton Anthology of American Literature. Of course, it’s very ironic that we in Gaza and Palestine read and appreciate and value American literature, and English literature, we study it, we just love it. And we try to imitate it, just as we imitate Arabic literature. But then all of a sudden, a rocket, or a heavy bomb that was paid for and manufactured in America, is killing, not only me, but the books that we read and studied in classes. That was very ironic to me.