When I Die
By Jehad Abu Dayya
Translated by Alaa Alqaisi
When I die,
hide the cause, the time, the way I fell—
don’t let my kin or friends know I was lost
in battlegrounds too tired to bear a name.
I’ve grown too weary of my life alone—
how can I come to terms with death made dull:
the death of roads,
the death of those on the run,
no grave to hold them,
bombings with no end?
This earth, too narrow now to hold my soul,
bleeds me of verse, of love, of memory.
I fear a death in silence—
yet my heart
has borne the weight of all these brutal wars.
I fear farewell—though once, I swore to you
that I would die for love,
for you alone.
When I die,
and I become a burden on the one
assigned to count the dead—
just scatter me:
my remains, and a friend’s imagining
of how we might have lived a hundred years
with no drones whirring,
no windstorms twisting tents,
no brothers buried,
no homes stripped and cleared—
just silence, peace,
and instead of bombs in the air:
Fairouz.
My tears dissolve at checkpoints far from home,
our paths confused—we didn’t even know
whose face we wore,
or whether death now shapes
our birth anew, from misery and waiting.
Here, where your presence feels like mere illusion,
seen only by yourself—
you sleep on dreams
and choke the throat of cloudlight as you pass.
You vanish,
since wishing is absurd.
Your ceiling is
a sky of missiles overhead—
you lie beneath it
waiting for it to fall.
It will.
The rope that holds your sky will break.
You sing,
this mocking life,
as if we were a weight
it never asked to carry—
as if we
had sparked revolt,
defied its rules alone,
and so, it takes revenge in cruel deaths
that shatter us to pieces
gathered like some scattered puzzle:
here a limb,
there an eye,
a few loose threads that once were fingers.
No time—
just long enough to bury what remains.
You’re the only one in this wide world,
yet you are multitudes in one small frame.
You are Hussein[1]
in a world of Yazids.[2]
And here, my Lord,
Karbala’s gone—
the roads themselves
are soaked with martyrdom.
Jehad Abu Dayya is a poet and fourth-year medical student with a clinical practice in Gaza’s hospitals. He was displaced from Gaza City on October 13th, 2023 and is currently still displaced in Deir Albalah in South Gaza. He has just released his debut poetry collection in Arabic, مذبوح في هامش الوقت, published by the Palestinian Ministry of Culture. Exploring war, displacement, love, loss, and distance, the book is available in print in the West Bank and online here. This poem, “وحين أموت,” can be found in that collection.
Alaa Alqaisi is a Palestinian translator, writer, and researcher from Gaza, deeply passionate about literature, language, and the power of storytelling to bridge cultures and bear witness to lived realities.
[1] Grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, seen as a symbol of justice and sacrifice in Islam.
[2] Umayyad caliph responsible for the killing of Hussein at the Battle of Karbala in 680 CE.