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

by Mosab Abu Toha

In Gaza, breathing is a task, smiling is performing plastic surgery on one’s own face, and rising in the morning, trying to survive another day, is coming back from the dead.

I can see the stars through a bullet hole in the ceiling.

We love what we have, no matter how little, because if we don’t, everything will be gone.

SEVEN FINGERS Whenever she meets new people, she sinks her small hands into the pockets of her jeans, moves them as if she’s counting some coins. (She’s just lost seven fingers in the war.) Then she moves away, back hunched, tiny as a dwarf.

Shrapnel was the tattoo marking your bodies for the ghetto of the Dead.

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’s not easy to think about it—as I watch my kids at the ages of six and four and one, unable to take in everything going on around them—should I write on their behalf? But what I am writing is different from what they are living. I can express, for example, how my little daughter was trying to hide from the bombs and then her older brother gave her a thin blanket to hide under. I can describe this in a poem, but I can’t express what it felt like to them to be hearing the bombs while not knowing that this isn’t a game or someone trying to scare you and play with you, but this is about life and death.