Rasha Omran: ‘I Want to Smile’
“I want to step out on my balcony and hang my laughter out on the clothesline, so that passersby can catch hold of it, scale the wall to the fourth floor, and laugh with me.”
Poetry
New Poetry in Translation: ‘Who Am I?’
“Who am I? / I am not myself.”
New Poetry: Maha Al Aswad’s ‘Death in Six Images’
“They walk beneath the sky. As their arms extend. As they grow new arms. As they carry their children.’
Mahmoud Darwish: ‘Till my End and Till Its End’
“Are you tired of walking / My son, are you tired?”
Bassma Sheikho’s ‘Scream’
“No electricity tonight. / Boredom is about to kill me.”
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.”
‘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—”