With an introduction by Jules Gibbs, poetry editor for The Progressive:
I first met the Palestinian poet and writer Mosab Abu Toha—along with his wife, Maram, and their three children—in Syracuse, New York, where Mosab was pursuing his MFA in Poetry. It was a warm, sunny, early fall day near the beginning of the pandemic; classes were online, and everyone was quarantining. They stood at the end of our driveway and we chatted for a while; the kids goofed around. Yazzan is eight years old now. Yaffa is seven. Mostafa, who was then in a stroller, is now three and a half. It's almost impossible to imagine them in the hellscape of war, displaced from their northern Gaza home in Beit Lahia, under fire, with friends and family members killed by explosions.
I’ve received a few brief emails from Mosab during this past week of extreme violence in Gaza, and he and his family are sheltering in the Jabalia refugee camp north of Gaza. In an email on October 20, he told me that they had access to running water for only two hours in the last fourteen days. No electricity for the past eight days. “Taking a shower feels like getting a diploma,” he said. “I survived death three times in the past fourteen days. No place is safe, even for a seven-day-old baby in her mother’s lap. I can smell death everywhere I walk.”
This may feel like no time for poetry, but I am confident Mosab would tell you that this is precisely the time for poetry, the time to bear witness, to make a “broken music” as a stay against death.
Despite his dire circumstances, Mosab has continued to write and send out work, and you can find recent essays in The New Yorker, The Washington Post, and The New York Times. Below, I share with you two new poems he sent to me this week. You can read more of Mosab's work in his debut book, Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear: Poems from Gaza, which won the 2022 Palestine Book Award, an American Book Award, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Walcott Poetry Prize. Also, look for another of his newest poems in the upcoming December/January issue of The Progressive.
My Dreams as a Child
I still have dreams about
a room filled with toys
my mother always promised
we could have
if we were rich.
I still have dreams about
seeing the refugee camp
from a window on a plane.
I still have dreams about
seeing the animals
I learnt about in third grade:
elephant, giraffe, kangaroo,
and wolf.
I still have dreams about
running for miles and miles
with no border blocking
my feet,
with no unexploded bombs
scaring me off.
I still have dreams about
watching my favorite team
playing soccer on the beach,
me standing and waiting for the ball
to come my way
and run away with it.
I still have dreams about
my grandfather, how much
I want to pick oranges
with him in Yaffa.
But my grandfather died,
Yaffa is occupied,
and the oranges no longer grow
on his weeping groves.
What a Gazan Mother Should Do During an Israeli Airstrike
She gathers all her kids around
in her bed, like one gathers and packs
books and clothes before leaving a hotel.
She counts her kids every second
and looks in their eyes. And she smiles.
She sings a night song to bury the sound of bombs
in the ground
and the whirring of drones in the clouds.
She hugs her kids after each bomb and
if she knows a bomb is about to light up the sky and the room,
she covers her kids’ eyes and
loudly asks the kids what can you see when your eyes are closed?
hoping her trembling voice may hide
the bomb’s deafening sound.