Vox Populi
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Mosab Abu Toha: Shrapnel Looking for Laughter
The house has been bombed. Everyone dead:
The kids, the parents, the toys, the actors on TV,
characters in novels, personas in poetry collections,
the I, the he and the she. No pronouns left. Not even
for kids when they learn parts of speech
next year. Shrapnel flies in the dark,
looks for the family’s peals of
laughter hiding behind piles of disfigured
walls and bleeding picture frames. The radio
no longer speaks. Its batteries have burnt,
the antenna is broken.
Even the broadcaster felt the pain when the radio
was hit. Even we, hearing the bomb
as it fell, threw ourselves
to the ground,
each of us counting the others around them.
We are safe, but our hearts
still ache.
—
Mosab Abu Toha was born and grew up in Gaza. In 2027, he founded the Edward Said Public Library, the first English-language library in Gaza. In November 2023, Abu Toha was arrested by the Israeli Defense Force as he traveled south with his immediate family to escape the IDF bombardment of northern Gaza. He was separated from his family, interrogated, and beaten; he was released after two days of imprisonment and has since crossed into Egypt with his wife and children. His parents are still in Gaza.
In 2019-2020, Abu Toha was a Visiting Poet in the Department of Comparative Literature at Harvard University. Abu Toha is a columnist for Arrowsmith Press, and his writings from Gaza have also appeared in The Nation and Literary Hub. His poems have been published in Poetry, The Nation, the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, Poetry Daily, and the New York Review of Books, among others. Abu Toha’s Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear: Poems from Gaza, from which this poem was selected, won a 2022 Palestine Book Award and Arrowsmith Press’s 2023 Derek Walcott Poetry Prize.
Poem copyright 2022 Mosab Abu Toha. From Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear: Poems from Gaza (City Lights, 2022).
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Mosab is one of my favorite writers. Do read his book. Conditions were the same in Gaza in 1989 when I lived there. Now the horrors are on steroids with American complicity. We need to speak up.
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Yes!
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A beautiful, grievous poem chronicling the horror. I am undone.
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Undone by tragedy, partially restored through beauty.
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I’m completely undone by so much in the world this moment and most of all by Gaza. The tragedy has had beautiful spokespersons and eloquent minds accompanying a situation that is nothing short of Genocide. Even some of those voices have now been silenced. It is difficult to appreciate an Art raised out of such conditions by for to do so is also to back away a moment from the portrayal of horror that should only properly be reviled to the fullest extent of our hearts. And so its awkward love to give, though both artist and creation are so deserving, despite the genesis of their expression. I’ve been wrestling with this today.
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Beautifully said, Sean. Thank you.
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Let’s see if this works. Posting in comment under a picture of grapevines on Facebook. Preaching to the choir, but maybe it will get through to someone.
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Thanks, Barb!
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It almost doesn’t matter who bombs whom. This is pure heartbreak. Expressed in the right words and images (almost imposible but the poet has the tools, the heart, and the pain) this is heartrending and brings back my mild PTSD from my baby- and childhood in WWII. He took me to a place I am usually shy to visit.
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My in-laws, now passed, survived the bombing of their hometown of Siegen during WWII. After the war, they almost starved to death.
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Such impossible pain.
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Unimaginable what the people of Gaza and now Lebanon are going through. Let’s don’t forget that our tax money is financing the slaughter.
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Wish the response could be agree rather than like
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ohhh. oh. oh. . .
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I am losing my words. Both posts.
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I have lost my words for today’s other Gaza post, too. Except one not quite word: PTSD…
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One primary challenge for the reader of this poem is how to channel the moral outrage it evokes into something other than resignation. “Perhaps” the long civil war in Northern Ireland, finally brought to a more peaceful stage, could be a case study in how to do that. “Perhaps.” Other readers might have more productive ideas.
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Thanks, Jim.
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Thank you. So very powerful.
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Yes, they are. Mosab is one of my heroes.
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Everyday…..this describes everyday in Gaza.
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yes. everyday until they are killed.
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