From ‘My Butterfly That Does Not Die’
Refaat Al Areer had set the scene, declaring, “If I must die,” and Alaa Al Qatarawi’s sorrow metamorphosed into a butterfly that perseveres. She writes, “If I die, my butterfly does not die.”
Poetry
‘A New Year in Gaza’: By Ibrahim Nasrallah
The people named in this poem are the writers, painters, and musicians martyred in the genocide. They are only a few of the many artists who were martyred in the past two years of war against Gaza.
Three Poems by Nima Hasan
“Hold me before the game ends. / Like everything else, / grief needs time / to become a language.”
New Poetry in Translation: ‘From a Country That Was’
“The temperature dipped a little / but the country’s still burning—”
‘What have I survived’: New Poetry by Mahmoud Alshaer
“I survived—came out of yesterday / alive, carried out on the shoulders / of the wind.”
Two (Communist) Poems by Saadi Youssef
“I’ve said it before, and I say it now on this London evening / before it’s too late: / I am the last communist!”
Mohammed el-Makki Ibrahim and the Homeland as Beloved
For Sudanese readers living through the current crisis, the following lines by the late Mohammed el-Makkī Ibrahim resonate with striking immediacy, even though they were written in the 1980s. Beneath the layers of grief, a restrained optimism continues to breathe through its lines.
‘The Love’: New Poetry in Translation by Hoda Omran
“Marriage is the afterlife / for which we have to cross this life, / leaving behind our homes and pasts, / waiting for justice with a light heart, / where our homes become our graves.”
Two New Poems by Olivia Elias
“nothing to hold on to no more suitcases / & nothing left to take away”