I
It’s half past 1 AM
I’m still happy
I lived a normal day
I woke up very alone
and will go to sleep alone as well
With peace of mind
Without hugging
I tell the world:
It makes no difference
Be as you wish!
I wake up with birds
I sleep next to dogs
I take care of a scabby stray cat
and gazelles that volunteered
for poems that don’t run
I have the features of a foreigner
Or a stranger in exile
I keep a homeless man’s sign on my forehead
I look like a ghoul when I laugh
and a maggot when I cry
Street cleaners and vendors know me
My clothes are dirty
My pockets have holes
There is a vegetable market and buyers in my head
There is free fruit in my heart
There is no place
None of the maps are good
My house is built with the sins
of a woman I left
I sing alone inside it
I sleep alone
I dream of no one
I remember no one
I wish a one-eyed gardener would prophecy me
Just see me with his snuffed eye
I dream of being the tree I climbed
In childhood
To have a million arms
To play with these snakes
of having an extinct insect celebrate me
I dream that my progeny
Ends before even beginning
II
Kamil, who was probably going to top his senior class in high school this year, was killed four months after his family evacuated to Rafah. Later, his mother used the books he brought along to kindle the fire and bake bread. Whenever she tore a page, she remembered him: “He used to love this class.” “He loved this subject” and so on. She would then bring out the loaf of bread, look long at it, and would cry. Her warm tears on that loaf are a declaration that this whole world has collapsed.
III
Three months into the war they brought a group of martyrs to the mortuary freezer in a small hospital. One of them was a seven-year-old girl. It was the first time I saw “unknown” written on a shroud. Every day, before I go to sleep, I invent a name for her. I read her a story. Every night, I see, once again, her closed eyes.
Anees Ghanima lives in Gaza City where he was born. He is a poet and web programmer. He received the “Young Writer Award in Poetry” from the A. M. Qattan Foundation in (2017).
[Translated from the Arabic by Sinan Antoon]