Muhammad Smiry + Mosab Abu Toha + Jason Gray
Mosab Abu Toha
Mosab recites his poem here:
What a Gazan Should Do During An Israeli Airstrike: A Poem by Mosab Abu Toha
What a Gazan should do during an Israeli air strike
Turn off the lights in every room / sit in the inner hallway of the house / away from the windows / stay away from the stove / stop thinking about making black tea / have a bottle of water nearby / big enough to cool down / children’s fear / get a child’s kindergarten backpack and stuff / tiny toys and whatever amount of money there is / and the ID cards / and photos of late grandparents, aunts, or uncles / and the grandparents’ wedding invitation that’s been kept for a long time / and if you are a farmer, you should put some strawberry seeds / in one pocket / and some soil from / the balcony flowerpot in the other / and hold on tight / to whatever number there was / on the cake / from the last birthday.
Mosab Abu Toha, New York Review of Books, May 11, 2023
Mosab Abu Toha is a Palestinian poet, essayist, fiction writer, scholar, and librarian from Gaza. He is the founder of the Edward Said Library, Gaza’s first English-language library. Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear is his debut book of poems. The collection won an American Book Award, a 2022 Palestine Book Award and was named a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry, as well as the 2022 Walcott Poetry Prize. He 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, New Arab and the New York Review of Books, among others.
Muhammad Smiry
Follow journalist Muhammad Smiry's twitter at @MuhammadSmiry
Muhammad Smiry is a Palestinian journalist based in Gaza. He writes: 'A Palestinian, born, raised and based in Gaza. I tweet about my life under the occupation! #Gaza'
Jason Gray
The following poem was written in response to Mosab Abu Toha's What a Gazan Should Do During an Israeli Air Strike (above), using the daily coverage of Gaza by Muhammad Smiry, who posts from @muhammadsmiry on X/Twitter. Muhammad's words, some of which are used here, provided pertinent and up-to-date knowledge of the lived experience of the Palestinian people under Israeli occupation today, in order to bring out the emotive tapestry of the poem.
Palestine: November 10, 2023
Tanks are visible from hospital windows
Blood banks are bombed
3-4-hour """humanitarian pauses"""
Strategic for the Israeli army who still bomb with
US weaponry
for the rest of the day
Pause the genocide for ethnic cleansing
Food and water are scarce
Palestinians drink rainwater – the property of the Israeli authorities
Children's hospitals and refugee camps
continued to be bombed
Disease is imminent
Aid trucks are attacked and cannot get through the rubble anyway
UN workers are killed
Palestinian journalists are killed
Some go missing from posting online and are feared dead
The West Bank – not controlled by Hamas – is attacked
A second Nakba – 75 years of terror
Soldiers and settlers collaborate to kill
Bodies of friends and family are strewn
in the streets – when they can be found
in the remains of destroyed buildings
and vehicles
2.3 millions captive Palestinians
deprived or displaced
This is Gaza
This is Palestine, 2023
Jason Gray is the Mauritian-Australian author of prize-winning book, HAUNT (THE KOOLIE) by Subbed In (2019), and the winner (2012) and judge (2018-2019) of Zine West Word. He has published and read widely, including Overland (2023), Liminal Mag's Collisions (2020), Griffith Review (2017) and Seizure (2014).
X/Twitter: @jasongray85; Instagram: @connectionrevolution
Olive branches with a few olives reach across a pale beige sky.
