Artwork by Fadia Jawdat
Homeland
this is more than a boundary issue
‹Also in this Issue›
Gaza, I Wish We’d Meet Under Better Circumstances
I first met the Gaza Strip on a television screen back in 2004, at eleven years old.
To Live Free
To colonizing propagandists, our story is the American Dream. To us, it’s an ongoing tragedy.
My Gifts from Gaza
Baba once mentioned how Palestinians were the patient dough of the Taboon. No matter how much we are kneaded, beaten, and stretched beyond our limits, our capacity for hope is supernatural. Taboon, even burnt beyond recognition, is still Taboon.
Three Poems
I’m against my country’s revolutionaries / Wounding an ear of wheat / Against the child / Any child / Holding a grenade
I am the stranger
I am the stranger / The shadow beneath the cloud / Adrift and looming over my land
(out of borders)
He wears winter and searches for another land, / Where he will say to the raining clouds, / To sow the sea in a land other than the one we know. / Hope was the last breath of the traveler, / Hope was his land.
Why I Love Secrets and Lies
You learn to make your gods as small as a coffee cup and hide your future in it
In October, the sky turned white
Why are these babies asking too much when they demand nothing but the most basic human rights?
A Farm in Gaza
My grandma had a farm in Gaza where her children played outside. Only her two oldest sons remember living there.
Letters to the Unliving and Unborn [for Palestine]
We are the land and the land is us. / Its holiness and grime cannot be dispelled from us.
For the Dead Among Us
We will open the day for you, and the night. We know that you are beneath the earth, or ash
A Few Lines
At a hospital-turned-housing-shelter, a father wept, cradling his newborn son at the gate of Al Shifa hospital.
I Was Imagining
Planes claim the sky; claim mothers and fathers, / Claim dreams, futures, one last kid's hope
