Mosab Abu Toha- My translation of a new poem by my friend Hamed Ashour, who is in Gaza and writing from there: And just like this, whenever you smile, I see sorrowful peoples migrating from one cheek to another, mistaking—while thirst is killing them— every dimple they encounter for a well of water.

 Mosab Abu Toha

@MosabAbuToha

 

My translation of a new poem by my friend Hamed Ashour, who is in Gaza and writing from there: 

 

And just like this, 

whenever you smile, 

I see sorrowful peoples migrating 

from one cheek to another, 

mistaking—while thirst is killing them— 

every dimple they encounter 

for a well of water.

 https://x.com/MosabAbuToha/status/2061653289687474377/photo/1

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"In order for me to write poetry that isn't political I must listen to the birds and in order to hear the birds the warplanes must be silent" Marwan Makhoul

Marwan Makhoul is a Palestinian poet, born in 1979 in the village of al-Boquai’a, Upper Galilee, to a Palestinian father and a Lebanese mother.

 "Who knows what will be enough to end not only this war, but the slow-moving devastation of Palestine. No one can be sure what knock will bring down the wall, open a door. At the end of the day some of us, at least, know we have knocked (and knocked), when even hope fails inside this obdurate empire—by putting words on the page, by calling Congress, by boycotting, by demonstrating, by gathering over words; perhaps the knocking is all we have." Philip Metres in the May/June 2024 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine  https://www.pw.org/content/in_this_time_of_war_the_muses_refuse_silence

In This Time of War: The Muses Refuse Silence

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‘My poems are part of my flesh’: Palestinian poet Batool Abu Akleen on life in Gaza: At just 20, the poet is one of the most vivid witnesses to the conflict. She talks about dreams of Oxford, the deaths of friends and how tragedy has shaped the person she has become.

‘I’m less timid now’ … Batool Abu Akleen. Photograph: PR -  One of her close friends, the photojournalist Fatma Hassouna, was killed in a strike this spring, a month before the Cannes film festival premiere of a documentary about her life, Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk.

 by Claire Armitstead

Batool Abu Akleen was having lunch in the seaside apartment that has become the latest refuge for her family of seven, when a missile struck a nearby cafe. It was the last day of June, an ordinary Monday in Gaza City. “I was holding a falafel wrap and looking out of the window, and the window shook,” she says. Within an instant, dozens of men, women and children were dead, in an atrocity that was reported around the world. “It doesn’t feel real sometimes,” she adds, with the nonchalance of someone numbed by living with horror.

But this impression is misleading. At just 20 years old, Abu Akleen is becoming one of Gaza’s most vivid and unstinting witnesses, whose debut poetry collection has already won accolades from the novelist Anne Michaels, the playwright Caryl Churchill and the poet Hasib Hourani, among others. She has thrown her whole being into finding a language for the unspeakable, one capable of articulating its surrealism and absurdity as well as its daily tragedies.

In her poems, missiles are fired from Apache helicopters, fleetingly referencing both the US’s role and its history of annihilation... READ MORE    https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/oct/05/my-poems-are-part-of-my-flesh-palestinian-poet-batool-abu-akleen-on-life-in-gaza 

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In Growing Gardens for Palestine: What is Home? a poem by Mosab Abu Toha

 

Growing Gardens for Palestine

Friday, March 14, 2025

What is Home? a poem by Mosab Abu Toha

https://poets.org

Mosab Abu Toha

What is home: 
it is the shade of trees on my way to school
    before they were uprooted.
It is my grandparents’ black-and-white wedding 
    photo before the walls crumbled. 
It is my uncle’s prayer rug, where dozens of ants
   slept on wintry nights, before it was looted and
   put in a museum. 
It is the oven my mother used to bake bread and 
   roast chicken before a bomb reduced our house 
   to ashes. 
It is the café where I watched football matches
   and played—

My child stops me: Can a four-letter word hold
   all of these? 

From Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear by Mosab Abu Toha. Copyright © 2022 by Mosab Abu Toha. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC, on behalf of City Lights Publishers.

Mosab Abu Toha is a Palestinian poet and founder of the Edward Said Library, Gaza’s only English-language library. He is a former visiting poet at Harvard’s department of comparative literature.  Photo credit: Mohamed Mehdy

 

Recent Books

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

by Mosab Abu Toha | Apr 26, 2022

Forest of Noise: Poems

by Mosab Abu Toha | Oct 15, 2024

Poem A Day - Academy of American Poets @POETSorg Mosab Abu Toha's [You were so small in my hands]

Academy of American Poets

@POETSorg

[You were so small in my hands]

Mosab Abu Toha

You were so small in my hands
no shrapnel could hit you,
but the dust and
smoke of the bomb
rushed into your lungs.
No need for any gauze.
They just closed your eyes.
No need for any shroud.
You were already
in your swaddle blanket.

Copyright © 2025 by Mosab Abu Toha. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on March 13, 2025, by the Academy of American Poets.

@mosababutoha

#PoemADay

 

 

Mosab Abu Toha is a Palestinian poet and founder of the Edward Said Library, Gaza’s only English-language library. He is a former visiting poet at Harvard’s department of comparative literature. Photo credit: Mohamed Mehdy

 poems

Year	Title
2025	[You were so small in my hands]
2025	[Gaza has become a funeral home]
2022	Discoveries
2022	Leaving Childhood Behind
2022	What is Home?
2022	Displaced
2022	Mouth Still Open

In Forest of Noise, renowned Palestinian poet Mosab Abu Toha explores the pain, loss, and struggle of life in Gaza, while holding onto his connection to home

'Every child is me. Every mother and father is me': A glimpse of Gaza, occupation and genocide in Mosab Abu Toha’s new poetry collection, Forest of Noise

 

Book Club: In Forest of Noise, Palestinian poet Mosab Abu Toha explores the pain, loss, and struggle of life in Gaza, while holding onto his connection to home.

Eman Quotah

06 November, 2024

You might begin reading Palestinian poet Mosab Abu Toha’s second collection, Forest of Noise, by judging his book by its cover. On a matte, off-white background, a bark-brown, finger-painted hand and spindly arm stretch diagonally; green thumbprint leaves sprout from the fingers. It’s a tree limb. A child’s raised hand. An arm stretched in terror.

With its multiplicity of meanings, Arsh Raziuddin’s arresting cover art captures the spirit of Mosab Abu Toha’s candid poetry about living in and through war and genocide in Gaza.

It teases a litany of quandaries central not only to this collection but also to Mosab’s online presence as an unceasing chronicler of Israel’s destruction of Gaza: How does life go on amid death and devastation? How do despair and hope feed each other? When will it end? How can we make art amid the rubble? How can we not?

"Throughout the book, Mosab grapples with poetry’s ability to convey the horror of life in Gaza under Israeli assault"

In a recent post, Mosab responded to the widely shared photo of 19-year-old Sha’ban al-Dalou, arms raised against flames as he burned alive. Witnessing this horrific image reminiscent of his cover, he writes, “How can I look at my book? How can I read my poems?”

Throughout the book, Mosab grapples with poetry’s ability to convey the horror of life in Gaza under Israeli assault — and makes clear to readers the price the poet pays when writing and revisiting what he has lived through.

He also vividly portrays his deep connection to everything in Gaza, where he lived most of his life before fleeing last December to Egypt, then the United States, with his wife and children.

In a dedication, he writes:

“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.”

Born in 1992, Mosab Abu Toha has endured multiple Israeli assaults, as well as the siege of Gaza that began in 2007.

His collection’s opening poem, Younger Than War, recalls tanks rolling “through dust, through eggplant fields,” book-burning soldiers, and warplanes overhead at the start of the Al-Aqsa Intifada in September 2000.

“No need for radio,” he writes, “We are the news,” and “At the time, /I was seven: decades younger than war, /a few years older than bombs.”

Last fall, Mosab himself became news when Israeli forces kidnapped him and other Gazan men and transported them to an Israeli prison. Under pressure from PEN International, the New Yorker, and others, Israel released him, calling his detention “a mistake.”

In On Your Knees, it feels as though he is sitting across from us, recounting the harrowing story aloud:

"On your knees!

A new soldier calls me by my full name.

He even says my grandfather’s name.

I love the name of my grandfather.

I hate the soldier,

I hate his name,

which I do not know.

Your ID number, say it aloud!

Remove your clothes,

Even your boxer shorts.

Turn around.

*

In my ears, I’m hiding

my mother’s stories,

my father’s recitation,

of the Holy Quran when I am sick."

These lines offer both a blow-by-blow account of Mosab’s abuse and humiliation and his interior response: wanting to protect and keep for himself the things that matter most to him (memories, stories).

As for many Palestinians, a lineage of loss and persistence looms large for Mosab Abu Toha, a third-generation Gazan refugee whose grandparents fled Yaffa during the Nakba.

In My Grandfather’s Well, his deceased paternal grandfather stands vigil in Yaffa. “Where have you been? Grandfather asks me,” Mosab writes. As though the living have abandoned the dead.

Later, in No Art — which echoes and responds to Elizabeth Bishop’s One Art (“The art of losing isn’t hard to master/so many things seem filled with the intent/to be lost that their loss is no disaster”) — Mosab writes:

"I’ve personally lost three friends to war,

a city to darkness, and a language to fear.

This was not easy to survive,

but survival proved necessary to master.

But of all things,

losing the only photo of my grandfather

under the rubble of my house

was a real disaster."

Writing after and in response to other English-language poets like Bishop, Whitman, Ginsberg, Bob Kaufman, and Mosab Abu Toha’s beloved late friend and mentor Refaat Alareer, the poet pushes against any notion that poetry must uplift and beautify — or that any poem can stand alone.

Of course, poets know their work is inspired by and in dialogue with other works. But today, individual poems have become standalone memes that many of us share on social media because we feel otherwise impotent to stop Israel’s violence against Palestinians.

Mosab’s unwillingness to hold any particular poem holy reminds us that poets’ conversations with each other, across time and space, among the living and the dead, hold more power than a single poem.

Take his response to Refaat Alareer’s well-loved poem of hope, If I Must Die (which echoes Claude McKay’s defiant 1919 resistance poem If We Must Die).

Refaat wrote of his own foretold passing, “You must live/to tell my story… let it bring hope/let it be a tale.”

Mosab brings another perspective by writing about the nightmare of always knowing you’re this close to dying: “If I am going to die,/let it be a clean death./No rubble over my corpse.”

He wants a funeral, something too many Palestinians have been denied, and clean, ironed clothes for his corpse. He wants the dignity of a nonviolent death.

He continues this logic in Rescue Plane, where he wishes for two planes: One to drop wheat, tea, and vegetables in Gaza and remove rubble. Another is to drop flowers for children to plant on graves. And then he strips away the flights of imagination and reveals his true, and truly simple, wish: “No planes at all.../No war/I wish we never had to wish.”  ... READ MORE https://www.newarab.com/features/glimpse-gaza-mosab-abu-tohas-forest-noise

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A Rose Shoulders Up- poem fragment by Palestinian Poet Mosab Abu Toha, gracefully illustrated by Hannah Maguire

Illustrated by Hannah Maguire

 

Palestinian Poet Mosab Abu Toha: "I miss my books. I miss the sea. I miss Gaza. Ceasefire Now!!"

Palestinian Poet  Mosab Abu Toha  "I miss my books. I miss the sea. I miss Gaza. Ceasefire Now!!"

Zeina Azzam, Alexandria’s poet laureate, whose parents fled Palestine, creates potent art from the devastation in Gaza- with her poem "Write My Name"

Zeina Azzam, the 2022 Poet
Laureate for the city of Alexandria, Virginia. (Courtesy, City of Alexandria/Jeff Norman)

April 14, 2024

Alexandria Poet Laureate Zeina Azzam first found it difficult to write about Palestine amid the ongoing conflict that started last October.

Now, her words about the children of Gaza have been translated into five languages and recited everywhere, from senators’ offices to churches, from vigils to protests.

Azzam says she was moved to pen the poem “Write My Name” after reading a CNN report about parents in Gaza who had resorted to writing their children’s names on their legs to help identify them should they or their children be killed.

More than 12,300 children in Gaza have been killed since the start of the Israel-Hamas war on Oct. 7, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. The UN agency for Palestinian refugees said that more children have been killed in Gaza in the last four months than children killed in the last four years of war globally...   READ MORE   https://patabook.com/news/2024/04/14/alexandrias-poet-laureate-whose-parents-fled-palestine-creates-potent-art-from-the-devastation-in-gaza/ 

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2023 Arab American news: Palestinian Cry from Gaza, ‘Write My Name,’ Goes Viral in Poem by Palestinian American

https://www.arabamerica.com/palestinian-cry-from-gaza-write-my-name-goes-viral-in-poem-by-palestinian-american/

 

Zeina Azzam's poem- Write My Name

 

Write my name on my leg, Mama

Use the black permanent marker

with the ink that doesn’t bleed

if it gets wet, the one that doesn’t melt

if it’s exposed to heat

 

Write my name on my leg, Mama

Make the lines thick and clear

Add your special flourishes

so I can take comfort in seeing

my mama’s handwriting when I go to sleep

 

Write my name on my leg, Mama

and on the legs of my sisters and brothers

This way we will belong together

This way we will be known

as your children

 

Write my name on my leg, Mama

and please write your name

and Baba’s name on your legs, too

so we will be remembered

as a family

 

Write my name on my leg, Mama

Don’t add any numbers

like when I was born or the address of our home

I don’t want the world to list me as a number

I have a name and I am not a number

 

Write my name on my leg, Mama

When the bomb hits our house

When the walls crush our skulls and bones

our legs will tell our story, how

there was nowhere for us to run

 

—Zeina Azzam

Pro-Palestine Activists Protest at the Met, Unfurling a Large Quilt Across Museum’s Stairs

The artwork “From Occupation to Liberation” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo: Alexa B. Wilkinson

 by Tessa Solomon 

 March 25, 2024 10:45am

A vast quilt calling for Palestinian liberation was unfurled across the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Sunday, making the institution the latest one in New York to be targeted by activists seeking a permanent ceasefire in Gaza.

Each of the quilt’s squares were rendered in the green, black, and red of the Palestinian flag, and bore an artist’s response to a prompt: “From oppression to liberation, free Palestine.”

According to the artist-led advocacy group Hope in the Art World, 64 artists participated in the creation of 30-by-50-foot quilt, titled From Occupation to Liberation. The squares variably invoked tatreez, a traditional form of Palestinian embroidery; poppies, a national symbol and a plant that is indigenous to Palestine; and Thomas Kilpper’s Jenin Horse (2003), a 16-foot sculpture installed removed by the Israeli military during a raid on the occupied West Bank city of Jenin.

The quilt also honored the poet Refaat Alareer, who was killed in an airstrike in Gaza in December. His writings have frequently been invoked by pro-Palestine protestors, most notably the verse, “If I must die/you must live/to tell my story…”

The presentation of the quilt at the museum was realized by a group of autonomous organizers working with the artists. Scattered worldwide, the artists rallied around feelings of solidarity and resistance—which coalesced into Hope in the Art World—and began gathering contributions to the quilt.

One artist who contributed a square and was present at the action told ARTnews: “I worked on putting the quilt together, gathering artists to paint and stitch. It was an act of love, unfurling the quilt felt like alchemy. We must find a way for love to win, artists, dancers, musicians, culture bearers and activists all brought their care and skills together to demand an end to genocide and to show support for Palestinians.”...  READ MORE      https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/pro-palestine-activists-protest-met-stairs-quilt-1234700782/

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