Breshly News

“I’d been angry for a while, and confused about what to do, and as soon as I was decided, I felt a relief,” Alice Oswald told Rachael Allen in our Art of Poetry interview in the new Winter issue. Oswald had decided to join more than five hundred protesters in London’s Parliament Square in August in support of Palestine Action, which the British government had designated a terrorist group. British police arrested Oswald, as she had expected and planned for, though her only previous interaction with the law had been “occasionally break[ing] the speed limit.” At the time, Oswald was mentoring young Palestinian poets through the Hands Up Project, a charity set up by Nick Bilbrough. Being involved in these young poets’ lives, Oswald said, made it impossible not to act. She worked with five others—two of whom worked with students in Arabic and three of whom helped them write in English—to mentor thirteen teenage students. “Some students had already been evacuated to Cairo, some were in the West Bank; others were surviving in tents or half ruined buildings in Gaza,” she told us in an email. “There were times when hunger, bereavement, displacement or lack of internet made it impossible to meet up. On these occasions, mentors exchanged poems intermittently through WhatsApp or voice messages.” Still, they tried to get together as a group at least once a month, and shared a Google Doc of their poems so they could read each other’s work. Rebecca Ruth Gould, a professor at SOAS University of London, invited the Hands Up Project to collaborate on a book called From Dust We Rise: New Poetry from Palestine, which collects the work of these Palestinian poets. The Review is publishing several of their poems here. These poems, Oswald said, are “an astonishing record not only of the darkness we have all been through, but also of human dignity, courage, patience, and recovery.”

 

Gaza—the stadium of the soul
by Bassim Helmi Hijazi (twenty years old)

On a land choked with blood,
there lies a field with no green grass
its soil the ashes of shattered homes.
The touchlines are not drawn in white chalk
but in the tears of mothers.
The two goalposts, a child who lost his arms
and a father searching for the scent of his child
beneath the stones.

And the crossbar between them
is the silence of the world,
unyielding as iron,
unshaken by screams.
The ball is not leather, not cloth.
It is the heart of Gaza
kicked by pain from one side,
blocked by resilience from the other.

The referee’s whistle is never heard,
for the bombing deafens every ear.
Extra time stretches without end;
every minute is a match,
every night another half.
Every goal we score
is canceled out by absence.

Yet still we play. We run—though weary.
We chant—though in tears. We shake
the ground as a striker shakes the goal.
In the stands of ruin, a crowd of barefoot children,
and grieving mothers, raising flags of torn cloth,
they chant for life, they chant
for a dawn that must come,
a dawn that blows the final whistle,
the whistle of truce.

 

When I am gone 
by Saleh Al Khalidi (seventeen years old)

Don’t lay flowers at the door
I passed by a thousand times,
and no one ever saw me

Don’t search for me in silence,
I was the silence
you never heard.

When my shadow falls from the wall,
you’ll realize
the wall was sheltering me.

But don’t worry
blessings are invisible
until they’re taken away.

 

The color red
by Alaa Kamal al Ban’na (fifteen years old)

I do not like the color red
But it lives in my knee
Throbbing with every pain
Reminding me
I came out from under bombs
But not completely

I am now in Egypt
The hospital bed beneath me
My father’s voice
Remains there
In Gaza
Silencing his name between my ribs
So I won’t cry out loudly

I follow the news nightly
I count the raids
like I count my breath
I say:
I wish he wasn’t there
I wish he was here

Even as I bleed
I pass a red phase
This is not life
But a waiting room
with cold walls
A screen carrying nothing
except a martyr’s face

I believe it is my duty
To heal
To stand again
Not just for myself
But for my father
For the rubble
Waiting for us to rebuild
With wounded hands

I love the silence
Because inside me
There is a scream
Too big for words

I do not like the color red
But it lives in my knee
Throbbing with every pain
Reminding me
I came out from under bombs
But not completely.

 

Message
by Hala Madukh (seventeen years old)

How do I tell the world
I’m drowning on dry land?
In the sand, in a small bottle
closed, shiny, and inside me
screaming, crying, in pain.
My voice is inaudible
and transparent, here in Gaza.
The world is on the other side
happily, freely, and safely.
I tried to break the bottle
only ash and rocky nights,
scary sounds and the color red.
The voice of death calling.
Inside is hell in a bottle,
but outside it looks magical.

 

What is your name?
by Islam Kamal al Ban’na (sixteen years old)

They asked me what is your name?
I said: the most beautiful of names

They asked me about my age
I said: the moment of my existence

They asked me about my work
I said: I sow goodness and kindness without a signature

They asked me about my perfume
I said: the kind word

They asked me about my height
I said: my self-esteem with which I rise above
the reproach of the sky

They asked me about my weight
I said: in adversity a mountain and in joy a feather

They asked me about my address
I said: a wayfarer without an address

They asked me about the world
I said: it taught me poetry.