A view of Gaza City and the Mediterranean Sea, October 2025. Photo: Ahmed Dremly

Do not ask me for stars.
Do not, because the sky and I
are no longer speaking,
not since the maps began to molt,
shedding pieces of home
like a wounded animal casting off its skin.
What have I to do with constellations
when entire neighborhoods
survive only in memory?
Do not ask, for what have I to do with beauty  
when every road I imagine
carries the dead.

I sit before a blank page.
A bird crosses it,
making the sound of a siren.
A tent casts its shadow on it.
A mother searches through dust
for a voice that still answers
to the call of her name.
And suddenly the poem is no longer a poem.
The sea enters it,
not the sea one views on postcards
but the sea of love,
the one that watches,
the one that remembers,
the one that has swallowed more farewells
than swathes of moonlight.

The dead keep asking me to write about life.
Gaza compels me to write about life
as though life were not the very thing
slipping through my fingers.
Each time I reach for the news,
ruin opens before me,
making language unable to afford
the luxury of flowers.

If my metaphors arrive barefoot,
forgive me.
They know the shards of ruin
the way my feet do —  
intimately.      
Forgive me if every sentence
leans downward, mourning —
leans
as if grief were gravity.
For even my imagination,
once wild with jasmine flowers, 
now arrives dust-covered,
limping,
checking for survivors.