This poem was commissioned for the Voiced festival, highlighting global and local endangered languages through creativity; author Hanan Issa also talks here about her relationship with the poetry of Nazik al Malaika.
These two poems are by Samar Al-Ghussein, a young Palestinian writer from Gaza who is at work on her first collection.
On Friday morning, the 23rd of May 2025, while Ala’ Al-Najjar, a Palestinian pediatrician at Al-Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Younis in the Southern Gaza Strip, was treating the wounds of the injured children of the genocidal Israeli war, she received the news of martyrdom of her nine children: Yahia, Rakan, Raslan, Jubran, Eve, Revan, Sadeen, Luqman, and Sidra. Her eldest child was twelve years old, whereas her youngest was only a six-months old baby. Nine days later, her husband, Dr. Hamdi Al-Najjar, joined his children due to his serious wounds. Ala’ has only one child left alive. This poem is written for her.
“Press your body to the sea— / it comes out cool, unharmed— / and let tears move across your hidden grief.”
French publisher Fidel Anthelme X is planning to bring out a bilingual Arabic-French collection by Palestinian poet Dana Flaifl, Tout ce que j’ai c’est l’écriture, avec elle je résiste, translated […]
Last week, we ran Fatena Abu Mostafa’s “A Life That Doesn’t Know How to Live”; this week, we have another poem that opens: “I’m not okay / but I say it politely, / so no one thinks I’m asking for help.”
This month Ḥattā lā yatrukanī al-dawʾ (So the Light Won’t Leave Me), a collection of Nima Hasan’s poems written in the second year of the genocidal war on Gaza, was published by Al Nasher Publishing in Ramallah, Palestine. Below is Rania Jawad’s introduction to the book, in the author’s own translation, followed by two excerpts translated by Huda Fakhreddine.
In this poem, by Fatena Mostafa, the narrator endures, “not out of strength, / but because even collapse has grown dull.”
The world, / with all its shining teeth, / still cannot feed / a single starving child.
