Even now, at the height of Israel’s attack through containment, military means, and the weaponization or withholding of aid, Palestinian poets are meeting in Gaza to read their poems, do spoken word poetry, and find a respite from the loss, pain, and fear that makes up everyday life as a target of genocide. Young poets, specifically, meet as the Gaza Poets Society, escaping the futurelessness the state of Israel is imposing on Palestinians. They have been doing so since 2018, though their situation has changed considerably over the last two years. They have published two anthologies so far: Love and Loss (2019) and My Death is Not a Song for You to Sing (2024). They are available on the Society’s Buy Me A Coffee page, and buying them is a way to support not just individual lives, or poetry, but a part of humanity as well. Their poems also regularly appear on their Facebook and Instagram pages, easily shareable. And very recently they have launched the poetry journal Gaza Verse.
The Gaza Poets Society is Mohammed Moussa’s vehicle – meaning both that his poetry is a central aspect of what it publishes, with many of his poems featured in the anthologies, but also and much more importantly that he selflessly spends a great amount of time driving others to places for which they yearn, or only had thought possible. This poet from Jabalia Camp, in the north of the Gaza strip, works to share the young poets’ writing, helping weave a thread between them and us by translating them and inserting his own poems. It is he who warns us with the title of the 2024 anthology: the Gaza Poets Society asks that we share voices and songs, that we support them – and, through the Creative Allies page, to join them with our own poets and songs – all this without waiting for their deaths and bemoaning their departure. His poem “My Death Is Not a Song” asks that we remember the children who are still alive and the land that is being turned into a site of destruction in this very moment. To do this, Moussa destabilizes the forgetting of attention and memory that comes so easily and addresses a you that forces the reader to decide whether they have belonged to those who kill children and whether they will continue to do so.
The first anthology includes Basman Elderawi’s love letter to a drone, which is a reflection on and onto the obsession of those who track Palestinians. Amal Saqer shows the continuation of patriarchy and love all at once, adding further contradictions and forms of violence to the tally. Hanin Alholy speaks of the permanence of death installed by its repetition. And Moussa describes his attitude and writes of his efforts, which are those of countless Gazans and other Palestinians: “I still wait to shade you / so I don’t have to write another lament.” These are poems of ash, dust, pieces, fragments; of cages and walls; but also of sea and sky and land, always greater than the narrowing that colonialism imposes. They show us a world that is now in shambles, though still they keep it together in part by reaching out for others. They were written before 2019, at a time when standing together to read poems, for spoken poetry events, still made it possible to outrun pursuers, for a while, when poetry could still act as a refuge.
Since 2023, that world had changed considerably (as has that of the West Bank). In the second anthology, published in 2024, poetry serves to chronicle sorrows. As Bara’ah and Fatimah al-Kilani write:
We write to quiet the
rush of anger burning our souls.
We write so that we may
thaw the silence that thwarts our uprising.
We write so that we may
stay,
so we may leave memories
behind when we inevitably pass through you.
We are annihilated and we
live despite our death.
We remain despite our
disappearance. We dream of being read even if in eternal silence.
[...]
We write because
happiness has become a forlorn emotion in this city,
my city, where love is a
feeling constrained underneath layers of morbid dreams.
With the complementary binaries like thaw/thwart, stay/leave/pass, live/death, remain/disappearance, read/silence, the speakers refuse to pretend that death is absent and to accept it as inevitable, as entirely present. They push against what remains avoidable. They move through the barriers emotions like guilt and helplessness create. They make present themselves as fully human even as they are being starved and regularly in danger.
As we can see in this part of a longer poem, there is much happening in this anthology beyond chronicling. There are attempts here to find words for what seeks to annihilate Gazans, not as a reflection or a look back, not to learn lessons or contain memories, but as death is directed at the poets, at their families, at their neighbours, and as the occupying force continues its genocide. Moussa’s own reflections on writing highlight the imminence of death, the brief character of words and life that burst out in these poems.
And so time is woven into the poems – and especially its splicing. Nadin Murtaja’s “Here” accompanies the slowing down of time, the end of night spreading past the arrival of morning: “time changes, hours pass, / and the darkness grows / until the morning arrives, the sky sheds dimness.” Raneen Azzazi’s speaker instead lives in the short present of repetition and refuses a temporality where bombs are forever falling: “But fear does not mature with age / to the voices that sound the coming of bombs / For the bombs sound different to my ears // every time / And the nerves in my body feel them anew / every time / reacting as though they are hearing the bombs for the first time / every time // I will not let myself get used to the sound of bombs” – the future is claimed as a new present, already contained in the present decision.
Just as remarkable is Murtaja’s “Besieged Sadness.” In long breaths, the poem is exhaled peacefully, even in its grasping and throwing the worst moments at us: “You scream and hit the face of the wall with your tendons and then your voice returns, disappointed because your walls isolate your voice.” Here too, the experience of writing is a matter of attention to the acute present, even as the self becomes ever thinner: “Your write poems and then you burn them, fearful that their letters will fly and be revealed. / You play the tune of your sadness on your thin body, with the broken shards of your mirror on the floor of your room.”
Beyond the chronicle, beyond the telling of stories, on the thin path that allows the poets to maintain their presence what can be cut out and either appropriated and taken away or isolated and left behind, we find love for a people and a land. Hana Hazaim’s “Love of an Olive Tree” wraps the reader not in love for the land, but in the love of the land, the love the land extends to the people who know where to sit, how to look, how to align their body with a place – even if they are cut away from it: “There is a stillness in my back / garden as I lie here drying clothes / swaying to eastern breeze gentle / humming of machine cut grass // There is a similar stillness / amidst the rubble of a Palestinian / home. The loud thunderous drone overhead of machine killed souls.”
The same project carries on through social media posts, where poems live as literary objects and as propaganda (in the best sense of the word) meant to agitate, meant to awaken and move us, as in this poem that interrogates the act of writing through its political intentions:
In “Free Bird,” Taqwa Al Wawi deploys oppositions in couplets to underline the distance between the life of a bird and life in Gaza, making avian life seem the most human of the two: “You eat what grows. / You eat what resists rot.” The speaker envies the bird’s capacity to sing, given the stories they hold back and the words the world will not speak.
In the careful and devastating images of “The Night Refused to Fade” – "screaming dust,” “half-buried in fear” – Ruba Khalid gives part of the feeling that comes with getting bombed, and above all a shattered relationship with space and home.
Affirming life and possibility against a permanently unsettled, hope-crushing present, Hala Al-Khatib narrates the many reversals of the immediate future in “A Half-Hour in Gaza.” The poems maintains and elongates the steadfastness of a moment, the refusal to feel guilt or disappointment, and the love for self and family that make them possible.
In three poems, Mariam Al Khateeb describes precise locations, holding them up as lived places and sites of life against their transformation into targets. Here she threads a series of weary similes; there she names the boredom of heat and survival; elsewhere she writes that “The sea is there as if it doesn’t know that a war has passed; that the world cracked open at night without its knowledge.”
The repetition of knowing, added to an entity that at the very least cognates outside of human ways of knowing, is a reminder of the desire for connection, for the very world and its elements to be more than aware of the reality of life in Gaza.
Jérôme Melançon wants Palestine to be free and Palestinians to stay alive, thrive, self-determine, and return to their land. He writes and teaches and writes and lives in oskana kâ-asastêki / Regina, SK. His fourth collection, Prairial·es, will be out in October 2025 with Prise de parole. Let us not forget his three chapbooks with above/ground press: Bridges Under the Water (2023), Tomorrow’s Going to Be Bright (2022), and Coup (2020), his occasional translations, and his book of philosophy, La politique dans l’adversité (Metispresses, 2018). He has also edited books and journal issues, and keeps publishing academic articles that sometimes have to do with some of this. He is on various social media under variations of @lethejerome, notably at bsky.social.
