Vox Populi
A curated webspace for Poetry, Politics, and Nature with over 6,000,000 visitors since 2014 and over 9,000 archived posts.
Mosab Abu Toha: Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear
For Alicia M. Quesnel, MD
I
When you open my ear, touch it
gently.
My mother’s voice lingers somewhere inside.
Her voice is the echo that helps recover my equilibrium
when I feel dizzy during my attentiveness.
You may encounter songs in Arabic,
poems in English I recite to myself,
or a song I chant to the chirping birds in our backyard.
When you stitch the cut, don’t forget to put all these back in my ear.
Put them back in order as you would do with books on your shelf.
II
The drone’s buzzing sound,
the roar of an F-16,
the screams of bombs falling on houses,
on fields, and on bodies,
of rockets flying away—
rid my small ear canal of them all.
Spray the perfume of your smiles on the incision.
Inject the song of life into my veins to wake me up.
Gently beat the drum so my mind may dance with yours,
my doctor, day and night.
Copyright 2021 Mosab Abu Toha. From Things you May Find Hidden in my Ear: Poems from Gaza (City Lights, 2021).
Mosab Abu Toha is a poet, short story writer, and essayist from Gaza. His first collection Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear: Poems from Gaza (2022, City Lights) won a 2022 Palestine Book Award. Abu Toha is the founder of the Edward Said Library, and from 2019 to 2020, he was a visiting poet and librarian-in-residence at Harvard University. During Israel’s 2023 attack on Gaza, Abu Toha was arrested by the Israeli Defense Force and beaten. With the intervention of the American Embassy, he was released, and he fled with his wife and children to Egypt.
Discover more from Vox Populi
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Good poem.
But one wonders why now. Do we need a vicious war to hear the others??.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Good point, Saleh. If we’d been listening all along, perhaps the current war could have been prevented.
>
LikeLiked by 1 person
Thank you
LikeLike
So very moving. Thank you for sharing this beautiful poem.
LikeLike
Thanks, Rose Mary!
>
LikeLike
Mosab has become one of my favorite poets recently.
>
LikeLike
I love this poem, so inventive as well as so heartbreaking.
LikeLike
Yes, it is. Thanks Pascale!
>
LikeLike
Voices like these — so impossibly moving — are the ones we must keep listening to. Keep posting. For they will prevail. They must. That’s what we must keep believing. Thank you Michael. And those voices exist on both sides of ANY war…
LikeLiked by 2 people
Thanks, Laure-Anne. Mosab has become an important poet to me in recent months.
>
LikeLiked by 1 person
Thank you for posting voices vital to the human heartbeat.
LikeLike
And thank YOU for paying attention to the human heartbeat.
>
LikeLiked by 2 people
A true voice for freedom, beauty, and justice. Thanks for posting his work.
LikeLiked by 1 person
An important poet who speaks directly to the current crisis.
>
LikeLiked by 2 people
Yes, I loved his work before the current crisis, and I love them even more now.
>
LikeLiked by 3 people
I am glad that they have freed him, a great voice in the Palestinian poetic landscape.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Indeed.
>
LikeLiked by 1 person
Absolutely true, but it is important to note that an international call went out demanding his freedom that came from many quarters, and absent that, I doubt he would be free.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Yes, the American embassy in Tel Aviv issued visas to him and his family and intervened when he was arrested. Without that help, he’d still be in an Israeli prison.
>
LikeLike
Yes, I know and I hope this happens soon for every Palestinian poet and activist unfairly incarcerated, but not only.
LikeLike