Translated from Arabic into Italian by Sana Darghmouni, the poems appeared in QCode magazine on 18 April https://www.qcodemag.it/interventi/non-ho-un-muro-per-far-accomodare-la-guerra-poesie-da-gaza/. The English translation is by Pina Piccolo, from Sana Darghmouni’s Italian translation. The cover image is a photo from Gaza by writer Yousef el-Qedra.
1
A woman who fills her pockets with sand
to secure the stakes to the ground
and patch the holes of her homeland,
a woman who gathers just enough salt to heal wounds,
only she knows the quiver of cold,
the warmth of melancholy
and the disappointment of bread.
I don’t have a wall so I can ask war
to please come in and sit down,
it’s just me and the tent
and a world that’s dying every day
as it performs its dance.
Let us rest, my friend, before winter comes.
2
Life is cramped,
a decapitated fish
tries to escape,
a sealed can of sardines
wrapped in dark melancholy
and gloomy is the market.
3
I wake up to tidy up the city
but the stove doesn’t work,
the coffee seller was killed in an ambush.
In no mood for coffee
withered by the cold,
I let myself fall asleep again
and dream of a garden,
a school
and a window to polish.
4
A mother who is afraid of dogs
gives the stray world
a pat on the shoulder
as she searches for the pieces of her child’s body
in the morgue coolers of drunkenness,
above the banquets that have been set,
in the fragment of a song
and in the mourning omitted from the news.
5
A registry official records names
and houses,
makes a note of the number of streets
then places the sheet in the corner of a tomb
and falls asleep.
Ni’ma Hassan is a Palestinian writer, poet, and social worker from Rafah currently displaced in Mawasi Khan Younis. She heals children traumatized by war with her art and writings. She has participated in numerous writing initiatives highlighting life in Gaza, including This is Gaza: Literary Text Written under Israeli Bombardment (7 October- 20 December 2023), and Writing within the Genocide. Among her previously published works, two novels “Where Flames Danced” and “It wasn’t Death”. Her poems have been broadly published and translated in print and online journals and she continues to contribute her poems of witness and protest in spite of the dire situation in Gaza.
