Isn’t It Our Time to Take a Break from Death?
By Haidar Al Ghazali
Translated by Batool Abu Akleen
While gasping for breath, I write. While my heart is panting, I count all my organs. Who will delete this wound from memory? Who will draw the hardships from my heart? Who will calm it?
My chest is a devastating war of existence. It is heavy words, the feet of which never stop walking and screaming, words that have the effect of sobbing, with a sound that encourages a person to cry. They sweep through me and grow orchards of grief. They slaughter graceful words as light as butterflies; their beauty is carefully polished. They have the scent of summer waves and spring trees. They were supposed to dwell in my eyes so I could see. But now, they are slaughtered. Forgotten. I recited them so many times that they became knives of bitterness. I turned them into nations of words, sentences, and poems, enough that they will never pull their agony from my heart and leave.
Once, I stepped away from you, Death. Once, you kept me away from the claws that reach out to people and toss them to you with no farewell, no funeral.
You know I don’t leave my home; I spend weeks alone with no company. So why wait for me to come out?
Did you know that I stole a few moments and went out? I took my laptop to the charging point to study for my university exams. Then I went to a small stall selling whatever vegetables were available. You came, heavy and painful. I ran from your rocks, which kept pursuing me. I waited for the dust to settle, to reveal the blood and the crime.
I was there, in your fatal embrace, before your shameless eyes that knew the way to our bodies so well. I ran, the way I used to, but not after a ball or a butterfly. This time, I ran towards her glassy heart (my mother’s) which was begging for my face from the windows, from people, from the smell of blood, and from the words of dust. Mother, I won’t leave you. They won’t write my name in the news. I devoted myself to being like you, and the people who are like you are known by birds, by the flowers on balconies, and by the grass of the earth. Those like you don’t leave so suddenly. They say goodbye first; they know exactly when their death is coming. Haven’t you taught me how to manage my time and organize my day? So why are you afraid? I haven’t said farewell yet; I haven’t told you my last wishes, I still haven’t written them down. Those who are like you, mother, don’t die before getting each of their tasks done. And I am like you, I resemble you, I resemble your heart. I won’t die before finishing my mission and living out my fated life and joy. Embrace me, so that I can collect the glass of your heart. I will drag my bloody corpse from your imagination.
I gaze upon grief and anguish. They don’t come to me naked; they are carrying seas of distress on their backs. They travel to distant lands in specific seasons, and they return in times of celebration. They applaud the mirth as it sets roses and colors in their places. They travel across seas and mountains to countries and villages. They smash love and launch wars. They save warplanes and weapons. They aim their sniper rifles at women’s bellies, children’s chests. They teach stones how to fall on bodies and roofs how to become thick, heavy tombstones over their inhabitants.
They don’t come naked. If they had, Death would not have unfolded its dictionary across my writing. I would not have stopped waiting for the morning’s naughty birds. If it hadn’t been naked, my poems would have resembled my mother as she combed our hair before school, and our joy when she left us to sleep on a rainy day.
They don’t come naked. They will keep coming like that until they overwhelm my heart. Memories are arrows that burst our illusions. They are tears that shape planets of sorrow in my chest, taking me to cemeteries, to friends who didn’t say goodbye. Over the marble, their cold names are sleeping, covered with dust and oblivion. Wait, there are still some spaces in my heart where grief and anguish have not yet tread. There are still poems that would be much more beautiful if they climbed the lips of those who are sleeping below ground.
Isn’t it time to take a break from your deaths? To come out of your graves and tell us about the killers’ eyes and names of their rifles, about the shrouds which, if we had wrapped them tightly around your bodies, our fates would not have been stolen by sorrow? They would not have come to us with your clothes, which, when we smell them, we cannot help pressing them to our chests.
Haidar Al Ghazali (@haidar.ghazali) writes poetry from Gaza.
Batool Abu Akleen (@batool_abu_akleen) is a poet and translator in Gaza. Her debut bilingual poetry collection 48Kg was published by Tenement Press in June 2025. She is a winner of the London Magazine Poetry Prize, 2025. She is a co-author of Voices of Resistance: Diaries of Genocide, and extracts from her diaries were performed at the Belgrade Theatre.
This short essay originally appeared in Al Araby. You can read it here.
Image: Dimit®i.