When you slipped out of your skin, 
you slip of a thing, 
the skin I thought I knew you in, it was dazzling 
and terrifying. How I had to slough 
wifehood off my dry arms, scrub it from my violently
blue-white legs, exfoliate its unmistakable musk. 
You were no more my husband than any other woman. 
What a thing to miss! And yet, and yet I tried to imagine 
clinging to you like a 1980s polyester nighty sparking in the dark
for God’s sake, images of bodies reaching over the mantelpiece
and going up in flames, people chimneys, burned on my child brain. 
Maybe I could do it, and clutch all that we made tightly 
until my fists shook. Stupid, smug ego snail. Who am I now 
without you but what I have always been, a white feather 
in the wind. I told you that when we met, and you cupped me 
in your hands – loosely, and the wind could blow 
at any gale, get knotted, and sure I’d toss a bit, and shiver, 
but I could mull that over in the dark, in the dark, in the dark – 
did you know? Did you know? They all ask, questions like prodding 
fingers. Have they stripped their spouses’ skin clean? 
Have they watched something fall away –
a lie, no. 
A pretense, no. 
A realisation, yes. 
An epiphany, definitely. 
What a ridiculous question though 
when you didn’t know and dressed as best you could 
in what you thought you should. We were just playing 
I suppose, until it was clear that it was serious as murder. 
The end of us, I mean.
The dream of us. 
Not your slinky escape from your chrysalis, not 
your beautiful fluttering into the light.

~ from Egg/Shell (Carcanet, 2024)

they set my aunts house on fire
i cried the way women on tv do
folding at the middle
like a five pound note.
i called the boy who use to love me
tried to ‘okay’ my voice
i said hello
he said warsan, what’s wrong, what’s happened?

i’ve been praying,
and these are what my prayers look like;
dear god
i come from two countries
one is thirsty
the other is on fire
both need water.

later that night
i held an atlas in my lap
ran my fingers across the whole world
and whispered
where does it hurt?

it answered
everywhere
everywhere
everywhere.

~ from Teaching My Mother How To Give Birth (flipped eye publishing limited, 2011)

The people they’re too exhausted to be any longer.
The people they don’t recognize inside themselves anymore.
The people they grew out of, the people they never ended up growing into.
We so badly want the people we love to get their spark back when it burns out;
to become speedily found when they are lost.
But it is not our job to hold anyone accountable to the people they used to be.
It is our job to travel with them between each version and to honor what emerges along the way.
Sometimes it will be an even more luminescent flame.
Sometimes it will be a flicker that disappears and temporarily floods the room with a perfect and necessary darkness.

~ from This Is Me Letting You Go (‎CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2016)

Tell me what's the difference 
between hope and waiting 
because my heart doesn't know 
It constantly cuts itself on the glass of waiting 
It constantly gets lost in the fog of hope

From ASTONISHMENTS, Selected Poems of Anna Kamieńska
Edited and Translated by Grazyna Drabik & David Curzon (Paraclette Press, 2007)

Long before hunger lays claim to the body, it loosens the scaffolding of language, erasing clarity, dismantling rhythm, and leaving behind the fragile debris of thought. What begins as a coherent paragraph soon dissolves into fragments, until all that remains is the involuntary tremor of a mind too starved to hold meaning. And so, before my language deserts me entirely, I write this, less to be understood than to remain traceable, to leave behind the shape of thought before it slips into silence...

Living in Gaza now requires a choreography of absence. We don’t walk; we drift. We don’t eat; we search. We don’t sleep; we remain alert, ears tuned to the sound that will send us running. Survival is a ritual of adaptation in a world that offers none. And yet, in the midst of these broken routines, I still encounter moments that remind me of our stubborn humanity. A woman tears her last piece of flatbread in half and offers it to her neighbor. A child draws bright flowers on a wall blackened by fire and soot. A grandmother recites Al-Fatiha over boiling water, though she knows there is nothing to add to it. These gestures are not illusions. They are acts of resistance. In a place where institutions and systems have collapsed, it is the human gesture—freely given—that preserves the sacred...

Hunger reveals truths no one seeks. It strips away every comforting illusion and shows what remains when there is nothing left to lose. I have learned that dignity is not a possession, but a practice—it emerges in the way one endures, not in what one owns. I have come to understand that memory, too, is a form of defiance. To name one’s pain, to record it faithfully, is to refuse erasure. I do not seek pity. Pity flattens. It turns Gaza into an object, a cautionary tale, a headline too often repeated to provoke response. What I seek—what I insist upon—is remembrance. Not simply of the hunger, but of the minds it has clouded, the hands that tremble over a final cup of tea, the eyes that scan the sky not for stars but for signs of fire...

And when the world finally turns the page—if it ever does—let it not say that Gaza was silent. Let it not imagine we vanished without speaking. We spoke with mouths filled with dust. We sang, even with broken teeth. We prayed from fractured knees. And though the world may have looked away, let this much be remembered: we named the hunger. We bore it. We endured. Let that emain.			

~ from Arablit.org July 23, 2025

Long before hunger lays claim to the body, it loosens the scaffolding of language, erasing clarity, dismantling rhythm, and leaving behind the fragile debris of thought. What begins as a coherent paragraph soon dissolves into fragments, until all that remains is the involuntary tremor of a mind too starved to hold meaning. And so, before my language deserts me entirely, I write this, less to be understood than to remain traceable, to leave behind the shape of thought before it slips into silence...

Living in Gaza now requires a choreography of absence. We don’t walk; we drift. We don’t eat; we search. We don’t sleep; we remain alert, ears tuned to the sound that will send us running. Survival is a ritual of adaptation in a world that offers none. And yet, in the midst of these broken routines, I still encounter moments that remind me of our stubborn humanity. A woman tears her last piece of flatbread in half and offers it to her neighbor. A child draws bright flowers on a wall blackened by fire and soot. A grandmother recites Al-Fatiha over boiling water, though she knows there is nothing to add to it. These gestures are not illusions. They are acts of resistance. In a place where institutions and systems have collapsed, it is the human gesture—freely given—that preserves the sacred...

Hunger reveals truths no one seeks. It strips away every comforting illusion and shows what remains when there is nothing left to lose. I have learned that dignity is not a possession, but a practice—it emerges in the way one endures, not in what one owns. I have come to understand that memory, too, is a form of defiance. To name one’s pain, to record it faithfully, is to refuse erasure. I do not seek pity. Pity flattens. It turns Gaza into an object, a cautionary tale, a headline too often repeated to provoke response. What I seek—what I insist upon—is remembrance. Not simply of the hunger, but of the minds it has clouded, the hands that tremble over a final cup of tea, the eyes that scan the sky not for stars but for signs of fire...

And when the world finally turns the page—if it ever does—let it not say that Gaza was silent. Let it not imagine we vanished without speaking. We spoke with mouths filled with dust. We sang, even with broken teeth. We prayed from fractured knees. And though the world may have looked away, let this much be remembered: we named the hunger. We bore it. We endured. Let that emain.			

~ from Arablit.org July 23, 2025

The ocean has not been so quiet for a long while; five night-herons
Fly shorelong voiceless in the hush of the air
Over the calm of an ebb that almost mirrors their wings.
The sun has gone down, and the water has gone down
From the weed-clad rock, but the distant cloud-wall rises. The
ebb whispers.
Great cloud-shadows float in the opal water.
Through rifts in the screen of the world pale gold gleams, and the
evening
Star suddenly glides like a flying torch.
As if we had not been meant to see her; rehearsing behind
The screen of the world for another audience. 

~ in the public domain

The almost disturbing scent
of peonies presses through the screens,
and I know without looking how
those heavy white heads lean down 
under the moon's light. A cricket chafes
and pauses, chafes and pauses,
as if distracted or preoccupied.

When I open my eyes to document
my sleeplessness by the clock, a point
of greenish light pulses near the ceiling.
A firefly...In childhood I ran out 
at dusk, a jar in one hand, lid
pierced with airholes in the other,
getting soaked to the knees
in the long wet grass.

The light moves unsteadily, like someone
whose balance is uncertain after traveling 
many hours, coming a long way.
Get up. Get up and let it out.

But I leave it hovering overhead, in case
it's my father, come back from the dead
to ask, "Why are you still awake? You can
put grass in their jar in the morning." 

~from you don't have to be everything, edited by Diana Whitney (Workman Publishing, 2021)

Some days 
I am more wolf
than woman
and I’m still learning
how to stop apologizing
for my wild.

~ from you don't have to be everything, edited by Diana Whitney (Workman Publishing, 2021)

On Earth, everyone loved butterflies,
but I trusted the caterpillars more.
I trusted the ones who knew

they were not done growing.
On Earth, I was a work in progress,
was comforted in knowing

that I had a million mistakes still in me
to learn from. I changed my mind
more often than I changed my socks,

and whenever I was criticized
for mismatched thoughts, I’d say,
who wants to be today

who they were yesterday?
Becoming was how I prayed.
But here—I am past the finish line:

I have a heart of gold,
and I never have to dig for it.
I couldn’t do anything wrong if I tried,
and trust me, I try, but

I get hot-headed, and my rage
toasts the marshmallow on an angel’s
celestial s’mores. I lose my temper and find it
in the halo lost-and found box.

Lies won’t let me tell them.
they handed me a sticker
that said My Name Is and I wrote
Everyone by accident. I can’t remember

what selfishness is. Yesterday I said
something angry about an ex, and a quarter
of my tastebuds jumped off my tongue.
I’ve known nothing

of bitterness since.
Right before I died, I thought,
In the afterlife, I’ll apply for a job
at a mistake factory. They’ll be awed

by my resume. If anything, I’m overqualified.
But there’s no place where they make 
mistakes here. Everyone is flawless.
Everyone’s blunders are photoshopped

right off their lives before 
they even happen. Is this heaven 
or hell? I can’t tell. I looked 
that famous carpenter up

in the phone book, but his number
wasn’t listed, and I need to ask him
where to find the wood to build
some missteps. I’m not about to spend

eternity burning in the lie that holy 
and perfect are the same thing.
Do you understand?

A promised land
is not a promised land
if I can’t keep learning

~ from You Better Be Lightning (Button Poetry, 2021)

“When you are trapped in a nightmare, 
your motivation to awaken 
will be so much greater 
than that if someone caught up 
in a relatively pleasant dream.”
— Eckhart Tolle

When I realized the storm was inevitable, 
I made it my medicine. 
Took two snowflakes on the tongue
in the morning, two snowflakes
on the tongue by noon.
There were no side effects.
Only sound effects. Reverb added
to my life span, an echo that asked—
What part of your life‘s record is skipping?
Which wound is on repeat?
Have you done everything you can?
to break out of that groove?

By nighttime I was intimate with
the difference between tying my laces, 
and tuning the string section of my shoes,
made a symphony of walking away from
everything that did not want my life to sing.

Felt a love for myself, so consistent
metronomes tried to copyright my heartbeat.

Finally understood I am the conductor of my own life, 
and will be even after I die.

I, like the trees, will decide what I become:
Porch swing? Church pew? An envelope
that must be licked to be closed?
Kinky choice, but I didn’t close.

I opened and opened until I could imagine 
the pain was the sensation of my spirit 
not breaking, that my mind was a parachute 
that could always open in time,
That I could wear my heart 
on my sleeve and never grow 
out of that shirt.

That every falling leaf is a tiny kite
with a string, too small to see, held 
by the part of me in charge 
of making beauty 
out of grief.

~ from You Better Be Lightning (Button Poetry, 2021)

1.
Something came up
out of the dark.
It wasn't anything I had ever seen before.
It wasn't an animal
   or a flower,
unless it was both.

Something came up out of the water,
   a head the size of a cat
but muddy and without ears.
I don't know what God is.
I don't know what death is.

But I believe they have between them
   some fervent and necessary arrangement.

2.
Sometimes
melancholy leaves me breathless.

3.
Later I was in a field of full of sunflowers.
I was feeling the heat of midsummer. 
I was thinking of the sweet, electric
   drowse of creation,

when it began to break.
In the west, clouds gathered.
Thunderheads.
In an hour the sky was filled with them.

In an hour the sky was filled
   with the sweetness of rain and the blast of lightning.
Followed by the deep bells of thunder.

Water from the heavens! Electricity from the source!
Both of them mad to create something!

The lightning brighter than any flower.
The thunder without a drowsy bone in its body.

4.
Instructions for living a life:
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.

5.
Two or three times in my life I discovered love.
Each time it seemed to solve everything.
Each time it solved a great many things
   but not everything.
Yet left me as grateful as if it had indeed, and
thoroughly, solved everything.

6.
God, rest in my heart
and fortify me,
take away my hunger for answers,
let the hours play upon my body
like the hands of my beloved.
Let the cathead appear again-
the smallest of your mysteries,
some wild cousin of my own blood probably-
some cousin of my own wild blood probably,
in the black dinner-bowl of the pond.

7.
Death waits for me, I know it, around
   one corner or another.
This doesn't amuse me.
Neither does it frighten me.

After the rain, I went back into the field of sunflowers.
It was cool, and I was anything but drowsy.
I walked slowly, and listened
to the crazy roots, in the drenched earth, laughing and growing.

~  from Red Bird (Beacon Press, 2008)

Summer late evening	

my friend the sunset 

to surprise me

took the most interesting streets

Late he was

Longer than ever before

~ from Dunce (Wave Books, 2020)

Because right now, there is 		someone

out there with

a wound 				in the exact shape
					of your words.
~ from The Second O of Sorrow (BOA Editions, 2018)

I come from
a people who pray five times a day
and make tea. I admire the way they do
both. How they drop to the ground
wherever they are. Drop
pine nuts and mint sprigs in a glass.
I think to care for the self
is a kind of prayer. It is a gesture
of devotion toward what is not always beloved
or believed. I do not always believe
in myself, or love myself, I am sure
there are times I am bad or gone
or lying. In another’s mouth, tea often means gossip,
but sometimes means truth. Despite
the trope, in my experience my people do not lie
for pleasure, or when they should,
even when it might be a gesture
of kindness. But they are kind. If you were
to visit, a woman would bring you
a tray of tea. At any time of day.
My people love tea so much
it was once considered a sickness. Their colonizers
tried, as with any joy, to snuff it out. They feared a love
so strong one might sell or kill their other
loves for leaves and sugar. Teaism
sounds like a kind of faith
I’d buy into, a god I wouldn’t fear. I think now I truly believe
I wouldn’t kill anyone for love,
not even myself—most days
I can barely get out of bed. So I make tea.
I stand at the window while I wait.
My feet are cold and the radio plays its little sounds.
I do the small thing I know how to do
to care for myself. I am trying to notice joy,
which means survive. I do this all day, and then the next.   
~ from The Missouri Review, Mar 22, 2020

All day I try to say nothing but thank you, 
breathe the syllables in and out with every step I 
take through the rooms of my house and outside into a 
profusion of shaggy-headed dandelions in the garden 
where the tulips’ black stamens shake in their crimson cups.   

I am saying thank you, yes, to this burgeoning spring 
and to the cold wind of its changes. Gratitude comes easy 
after a hot shower, when my loosened muscles work, 
when eyes and mind begin to clear and even unruly hair combs into place.   

Dialogue with the invisible can go on every minute, 
and with surprising gaiety I am saying thank you as I remember 
who I am, a woman learning to praise 
something as small as dandelion petals floating on the 
steaming surface of this bowl of vegetable soup, my 
happy, savoring tongue.

~ The Sun Magazine,  May 2009

Not every man knows what he shall sing at the end,
Watching the pier as the ship sails away, or what it will seem like
When he’s held by the sea’s roar, motionless, there at the end,
Or what he shall hope for once it is clear that he’ll never go back.

When the time has passed to prune the rose or caress the cat,
When the sunset torching the lawn and the full moon icing it down
No longer appear, not every man knows what he’ll discover instead.
When the weight of the past leans against nothing, and the sky

Is no more than remembered light, and the stories of cirrus
And cumulus come to a close, and all the birds are suspended in flight,
Not every man knows what is waiting for him, or what he shall sing
When the ship he is on slips into darkness, there at the end.

~ from The Continuous Life: Poems (Alfred A. Knopf, 1990)

I wish I could say I was the kind of child
who watched the moon from her window,
would turn toward it and wonder.
I never wondered. I read. Dark signs
that crawled toward the edge of the page.
It took me years to grow a heart
from paper and glue. All I had
was a flashlight, bright as the moon,
a white hole blazing beneath the sheets.

~ from Facts About the Moon. © W.W. Norton & Company, 2006

Just when you seem to yourself
nothing but a flimsy web
of questions, you are given
the questions of others to hold
in the emptiness of your hands,
songbird eggs that can still hatch
if you keep them warm,
butterflies opening and closing themselves
in your cupped palms, trusting you not to injure
their scintillant fur, their dust.
You are given the questions of others
as if they were answers
to all you ask. Yes, perhaps
this gift is your answer.

~ from Sands of the Well (New Directions, 1998)

translated by Batool Abu Akleen (Palestinian poet and translator) 

For 300 days, I was accompanied by Anya—my camera, and my only good friend who knew how to catch things, how to take the photos I wanted. For 300 days, my brothers and I were being killed in this massacre. Blood has been flowing over the ground, and I’ve become afraid of the moment when my brothers’ blood will reach me, will stain me. For 300 days, we’ve been seeing only black and red, smelling the scent of death, eating bitter apples, touching only corpses.

It’s the first time I have experienced such a massive loss. I have lost 11 members of my family, the dearest to my heart. Still, nothing can stop me. I roam the streets every day without any master plan. I just want the world to see what I see. I am taking photos to archive this period of my life. I am taking photos of this history which my sons might hear of, or might not.

We, we’re dying here every day in many colors and shapes. I die a thousand times when I see a child suffer; I splinter, I turn into ashes. It hurts me, what we’ve become. This nonsense hurts me, and this monster that eats us every day: it hurts.

Every day when I leave, I see my mother waving goodbye, but I don’t turn around. I don’t want to see those eyes. I don’t want all this sorrow for my mother, but what is there in this city? It is only death.

On mentioning death, the inevitable death:

If I must die, I want a resonant death. I want to be neither a newsflash, nor a number within a group. I want a death heard by the whole world, an impact imprinted forever, and everlasting photos that won’t be buried by time or place.

~ from: https://arablit.org/2025/04/20/a-resonant-death-poems-reflections-by-fatima-hassouna