The Record
السِّجلWhat is documented, and by whom
The Land
الأرضGeography is the argument made visible
The Voice
الصوتWhat a people made, and go on making
The Majlis
المجلسThe room where the coffee is poured
The current exhibition
Gaza: Siege and Sumud
One of the oldest cities on earth, under the most documented siege of the modern era — and the people who keep teaching, writing, and reporting through it.
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Show me something at randomThe anthology
Single poems, presented slowly. Where a published translation exists we use it; where the Arabic is certain we set it alongside. Only fragments are shown here — each poem has its own page, with its source.
30 poems · 10 with the Arabic · 6 themes
من سجن عكا طلعت جنازة
The funeral song for Fuad Hijazi, Muhammad Jamjoum and Atta al-Zir, hanged by the British at Acre prison on 17 June 1930. It went out with their funerals and never stopped being sung — in the camps, at commemorations, and inside the prisons.
If I must die,you must live
Written in 2011 and shared again weeks before an Israeli airstrike killed him in December 2023, Alareer's final poem became a global testament — a request to be remembered as a story, and a kite, bringing hope.
"A true Arab knows how to catch a fly in his hands,"my father would say. And he'd prove it,
Nye remembers her Palestinian father through the small parables he passed down — and asks what a 'true Arab' can do when the headlines themselves clot in the blood.
Do not fearwhat has blown up.
From breaking poems — Hammad's hip-hop-fused book of war, women, and survival — a meditation on cluster munitions and what they leave behind: do not fear what has blown up; fear the unexploded.
يا عدو الشمس لكن لن أساوم
You may take the last strip of my land,Feed my youth to prison cells.
Al-Qasim's defiant refrain — 'I shall not compromise... I shall resist' — traveled far beyond Palestine: a handwritten copy was found among George Jackson's prison books.
كفاني أموت عليها وأدفن فيها
Enough for me to die on her earthbe buried in her
Touqan's brief late poem asks for one thing only — to die on her country's soil and remain there as dust, grass, and a flower. Its lines are carved on her gravestone in Nablus.
Hamza was one from my town, like the others,who eats his bread nicely…
A man from Touqan's own town, ordinary as bread, tells her in the years after 1967 to be patient and not to weaken — the land, he says, will remain alive and will not die.
In Lidda, in Ramla, in the Galilee,we shall remain
The anthem of Palestinian steadfastness: Ziyad vows that those who remained in Lidda, Ramla, and the Galilee will stay 'like a wall upon your chest' — rooted, working, and unerasable.
أناديكم
I call to youI clasp your hands
Ziyad's pledge to his homeland and his people: orphaned, naked and barefoot, he has carried his blood in his palm and never lowered his flag.
لا أستطيعُ الحضور، فالمسافةُ بين واقعي وذاكرتي تؤكِّدُ أنَّ أينشتاين على حقّ، وأنَّ الطاقةَ المنبثقةَ من اشتياقي تساوي حاصلَ ضربِ الكتلةِ في مربَّعِ سرعةِ الضوء.
I can't attend, for the distance between my reality and my memory confirms that Einstein was right and the energy produced by my longing equals mass multiplied by the speed of light squared.I can't attend but I can be absent, yes, I can be absent with great skill. I've become an expert in recent times and I've acquired a diary where I make a note of the times I have to be absent and I have memories that haven't happened yet.
The exile's litany of excuses: a Palestinian poet safe in Stockholm explains — with black humor and survivor's guilt — why the road between his poem and Damascus is cut off.
سجّل أنا عربي
Write down!I am an Arab
Darwish's most famous early poem turned an ID number into defiance: its refrain 'Record! I am an Arab' made the young poet famous overnight and remains one of the most quoted lines in modern Arabic poetry.
In Jerusalem, and I mean within the ancient walls,I walk from one epoch to another without a memory…
Darwish walks the Old City from one epoch into another without a memory to guide him — a poem in which prophets share a history and the walker is left asking who he is.
مَوْطِنِي مَوْطِنِي
My homeland, my homeland,Glory and beauty, sublimity and splendour…
The verse that became Palestine's unofficial anthem — sung at demonstrations and funerals for ninety years, and adopted as the national anthem of Iraq in 2004.
ولولا مئة وجع تلح عليك
Though you sought to avoid it,it returns to strike you, because,
Barghouti's book-length poem keeps a man awake on New Year's Eve as memory, war, and grief pour through his window — and still insists that he was born for joy.
On Ma's faceThere is a book
A miniature portrait of a mother's face, where every line holds a book, a hope, a love — Alareer's tender counterpoint to the poetry of siege.
The tiny journalistwill tell us what she sees.
Written for Janna Jihad, the child who began documenting occupation with her mother's phone at age seven: the 'tiny journalist' sees everything — and 'she's bigger than you are.'
I look out my window. The housenext door no longer
A bombing night in Gaza: the neighbor's house lies 'like an old carpet on the floor of the earth' — and the poem becomes the only place the small facts of a destroyed household survive.
على هذه الأرض ما يستحق الحياة
We have on this earth what makes life worth living:April's hesitation, the aroma of bread
A litany of small, ordinary reasons to live — bread at dawn, grass on a stone — that ends by naming Palestine as the Lady of Earth and declaring 'I deserve life.'
Resist, my people, resist them.In Jerusalem, I dressed my wounds and breathed my sorrows
The poem that put a poet on trial: posted online in October 2015, it led to Tatour's arrest, conviction, and imprisonment — before an Israeli court ruled on appeal that the poem was not a crime.
At times … Iwish
A poem that spends its whole length imagining a duel with the man who killed the poet's father — and then dismantles the duel, one relative at a time, until nothing is left to kill.
They call us now.Before they drop the bombs.
Written during Israel's 2014 assault on Gaza, Tuffaha's poem answers the phone call no one should receive — the one that says your house is next — and asks what courtesy means in a prison by the sea.
& I found it in that half-liminal light, divined into fractal’s endless—before split
A search for origins along an American river and a mother's breath — Abraham rewrites the pastoral as a Palestinian form, where to arrive at a landscape is to have a past to run from.
Fado, I'll sleep like people dowhen shells are falling…
Darwish addresses the Portuguese fado and proposes to sleep the way people sleep when the shells are falling — a poem about exhaustion rather than defiance.
Can you diagnose fear? The red tree blooming from uterusto throat. It’s one long nerve, the doctor says. There’s a reason
A poem that begins with a diagnosis of fear and ends as an instruction for living: whatever you build will be ruined, so make it beautiful.
I will carry my soul in my palmand throw it into the abyss of ruin…
Written by a schoolteacher in his twenties who was killed in battle eleven years later — the poem that earned Abd al-Rahim Mahmoud the name 'the martyr poet.'
When you open my ear, touch itgently.
Addressing the surgeon who opens his ear, Abu Toha catalogs what is stored inside — his mother's voice, songs, and the sounds of drones and bombs — memory as an archive that must be put back in order.
أحن إلى خبز أمي
I long for my mother's bread,And my mother's coffee,
Written from an Israeli prison as a letter of longing for his mother's bread, coffee, and touch — later sung by Marcel Khalife, it became one of the most beloved poems in the Arab world.
On the day you kill meyou'll find in my pocket
A short poem addressed to the man who will kill him: search my pockets, you will find tickets — to peace, to the fields and the rain, to the conscience of humankind. Don't waste them.
We teach life, sir.We Palestinians wake up every morning to teach the rest of the world life, sir.
Ziadah's answer to a journalist who asked if Palestinians would 'just stop teaching their children to hate' — a spoken-word poem that became one of the most shared performances of Palestinian poetry ever recorded.
I was born without a passport,I grew up…
Born without a passport, the poet watches his country turn into prisons — and answers by planting a country, a sun, and wheat inside every house.
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