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

by Mosab Abu Toha

I weave my poems with my veins. I want to build a poem like a solid home, but hopefully not with my bones.

They once said Palestine will be free tomorrow. When is tomorrow? What is freedom? How long does it last?

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.

We love what we have, no matter how little, because if we don’t, everything will be gone. If we don’t, we will no longer exist, since there will be nothing here for us.

My withered umbilical cord tries to pull me to my sick mother’s bedside before it is cut mid-nowhere.

“I am not afraid of death. I am ready but I am not waiting for it.”

He asks death if it could wait for some time until he finishes writing his new poem. He looks at himself in the mirror and puts a fresh rose in his lapel for the coming long journey.

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.

It is a fact that we live under siege, and we live under an unceasing war of attrition. But there are some beautiful things around me: there is the sea, there are the clouds, there are flowers and trees and lemons on the trees, and these are things to enjoy, even if it is a momentary thing. And when I read poems, sometimes I see things around me that I don’t usually notice until I read about them in a poem. Oh, this lemon, it really looks like the lemon this poet in Europe talks about.