I Call to You
أناديكم
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.
أناديكم
أشد على أياديكم..
أبوس الأرض تحت نعالكم
وأقول: أفديكم
I call to you I clasp your hands And kiss the earth beneath your feet And I say to you: I sacrifice myself for you And dedicate the light of my eyes to you And the warmth of the heart, I give you …
(excerpt — English translation by Atef Alshaer)
About this poem
“I Call to You” (Unadikum) is the title poem of Tawfiq Ziyad’s 1966 collection Ashiddu ‘ala Ayadikum (I Clasp Your Hands), written for the Palestinians who remained in their homeland after 1948 and lived under Israeli military rule. Its opening address — clasping the people’s hands, kissing the earth beneath their feet — builds to the poet’s own account of steadfastness: “I have stood in the face of my oppressors / Orphaned, naked and barefooted … / I have carried my blood on my palm / And have not lowered my flag.”
Set to music by the Lebanese singer and composer Ahmad Kaabour, “Unadikum” became one of the best-known Palestinian anthems — what Al-Araby Al-Jadeed called “the anthem of the Palestinian wound.” This translation, by the anthology’s editor Atef Alshaer, appeared in A Map of Absence: An Anthology of Palestinian Writing on the Nakba (Saqi Books, 2019).
Sources
- A Map of Absence: An Anthology of Palestinian Writing on the Nakba (Saqi Books, 2019), ed. Atef Alshaer (anthology PDF; translation verified here)
- أناديكم .. أشد على أياديكم — توفيق زياد — الديوان (Arabic original)
Connected in the archive
1 connected record1 record elsewhere in the archive are linked to this one, each by a piece of evidence you can read below.
written by — 1 record
- Tawfiq Ziyadتوفيق زيّاد
Evidence — From a recorded field in this archive: poetSlug: "tawfiq-ziyad" → Tawfiq Ziyad
Cite this page
Every claim above carries its sources — citation is the point.
- Chicago
“I Call to You — Tawfiq Ziyad.” Poems, FALASTEEN.AI. Accessed 22 August 2026. https://falasteen.ai/poems/i-call-to-you.- MLA
“I Call to You — Tawfiq Ziyad.” Poems, FALASTEEN.AI, 2026, https://falasteen.ai/poems/i-call-to-you. Accessed 22 August 2026.- BibTeX
@misc{falasteen-i-call-to-you, title = {I Call to You — Tawfiq Ziyad}, howpublished = {\url{https://falasteen.ai/poems/i-call-to-you}}, organization = {FALASTEEN.AI — A Living Archive for Palestine}, year = {2026}, note = {Accessed 2026-08-22} }