When the War Parts: A Poem from Gaza by Heba Al-Agha

When the War Parts

By Heba Al-Agha

Translated by Julia Choucair Vizoso

I won’t be the same

might become a closet or a bed

a gas canister, a rug

a library 

a giant lap, one long embrace.

 

When the war parts

I won’t find a grave to visit 

for the road itself will be the graveyard

There will be no flowers to lay

as they too will have died.

No palms on graves, and no graves either.

 

I will stumble on a head here, a foot there, a friend’s face

on the ground, his bag carrying crumbs for the little ones.

Scattered eyes, I’ll see them everywhere

and a heart that has gotten lost, panting

will settle on my shoulder 

and I´ll walk it through the rubble

this broken stone with which we were killed. 

 

No history book said how

to prepare for the long war

no class taught to pitch a tent 

on the side of the road

no math teacher said that the corner 

fits ten people

no religion class revealed:

children also die

also rise

as a butterfly, a bird, a star.

 

I hated chalk once

and the morning lineup too

but loved to pause in an opening line

stroll through the Eastern line 

lose myself in the city perched on twin trees

But I am outside any city I know

outside all place and ejected from time 

to the dimension of Gaza, to ask 

what has happened what is happening

What is  the name of our street?

Have any of you seen our street, our house?

Do the neighborhoods still know each other?

Can the city recognize us? 

Can my mother? 

Is the sea counting the victims?

Does the sun rise to shield the bodies in the streets?

Can the merchants afford heaven?

Will these bodies sprout tall buildings that bear their names?

Their names, will we know them all?

My aunts, will they fathom the catastrophe?

The house, was it really our house?

Does the soldier sleep a night?

 

My throat is swollen

from words 

without remedy 

but bayt: this line, home.

 

Translator’s note: This poem was first published in Arabic on February 8, 2024 on Heba Al-Agha’s Telegram channel and later the same day on the website gazastory.com: https://gazastory.com/archives/5335. Since October 22, 2023, the author has been sharing her diary from Gaza through these two channels. The entries include poetry, freeform narration, descriptions, and visuals, as she is forced to move with her children from her home in Khan Younis to Rafah, where this poem was written. Her work has not been translated to English, except for a short text that will appear in a forthcoming issue of ArabLit Quarterly (translated also by Julia Choucair Vizoso). Heba and Julia have been communicating through WhatsApp, through a family member of Heba, intermittently, whenever communication is possible.

Heba Al-Agha is a mother, amateur writer, and creative writing educator at the A.M. Qattan Foundation in Gaza City. She does not belong to any writers’ unions and has not published any literary books, but works with an army of young writers training them in freedom and the power of writing. She writes at t.me/hebalaghatalkwar andhttps://gazastory.com/archives/author/hebaaga. 

Julia Choucair Vizoso is an independent scholar and seasonal translator. She hopes Heba Al-Agha’s words move you to refuse and resist the Israel-US genocide of the Palestinian people and destruction of Lebanon, wherever and however you can.