Italian translation from Arabic by Sana Darghmouni (first appeared in Q Code on April 29, 2025), English translation from Italian by Pina Piccolo. Cover image, photo by Pina Piccolo.
”I want life, but first and foremost, I want a home”
1
If heaven is my fate, my aspirations are bound to be unusual:
I shall experience the whole movie once again
and grow among the fools who stare me in the face
setting traps for me,
where my falls would be fitting
I shall graduate from the university I love
and dance in heaven, for a radiant door shall open.
May this enchanted vision finally be shattered.
I want everything to be hard.
These hands were forged for love
and for the crushing of rocks too.
I wish for the weight of exhaustion
as I build my first home,
my children’s room and the garden.
In the shelter of my slumber, I wish for every stone
to have its distinct history of pain.
May rest be sublime!
While others will be basking in pleasure,
I’ll have fallen into the traps of fools,
I’ll have graduated from my beloved university
and, after hard work, built a house full of windows and children.
And then, soaked in sweat, I shall proclaim:
Oh, I’ve done my job:
I have lived life.
2
I want to live,
which means: be unskilled at fixing light switches
or changing door handles,
be bored to death listening to lectures and be swamped with notes,
be engaged in battle against an indiscreet mouse invading the room,
and after the dawn prayer, stand at the window listening to Umm Kulthum.
It means, guessing a girl’s life from the precise and sharp kajal line she draws,
to commit sins requiring divine forgiveness and suffer culinary failures.
It means, having a chronic love for the smells of homes,
the whitewashed walls
and conversation with the roses on the balcony.
I want to live,
I want to write letters to a real beloved, unlike what I do now every day,
give her a notebook to jot down how waves bow to the feet of two lovers on the shore,
the longed-for kisses that never happened, and turned into grass and roses along the streets.
A notebook to write down the names of our children, chosen by her,
provided that she sing to them, in her womb,
about the revolution
and Palestine, which wants us alive.
I want life,
but first and foremost
I want a home.
3
Can you tell what is the meaning of a lesion opened just wide enough
to suggest that the heart is itself a wound?
Do you know what happens when someone bids farewell to their friends
having spent their whole share of deep pain
and mourning?
Nothing happens.
He just dies shortly after they depart.
Haidar al Ghazali is a twenty-year-old a poet from Gaza. He writes, publishes and recites his poetry on Instagram: @ haidar.ghazali. For as long as he was able, he studied English Literature and Translation in Gaza, sadly his university is now razed to the ground and he is trapped in Gaza, experiencing daily Israeli air raids.
