New Poetry in Translation: ‘Who Am I?’
“Who am I? / I am not myself.”
Poetry
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—”
‘What have I survived’: New Poetry by Mahmoud Alshaer
“I survived—came out of yesterday / alive, carried out on the shoulders / of the wind.”