If I Must Die
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.
Watch
Recording: Palestine Festival of Literature
If I must die, you must live to tell my story to sell my things to buy a piece of cloth and some strings,
(make it white with a long tail)
so that a child, somewhere in Gaza while looking heaven in the eye awaiting his dad who left in a blaze— and bid no one farewell not even to his flesh not even to himself—
sees the kite, my kite you made, flying up above and thinks for a moment an angel is there bringing back love
If I must die let it bring hope let it be a tale
— Refaat Alareer, November 27, 2011
About this poem
Alareer wrote “If I Must Die” in 2011 and shared it again on social media in November 2023, during Israel’s assault on Gaza. On 6 December 2023, he was killed in an Israeli airstrike on his sister’s home in Shuja’iyya, Gaza City, along with his sister, brother, and four of his nephews and nieces. Within days, the poem spread around the world — read at vigils, translated into dozens of languages, and recorded by the actor Brian Cox with the Palestine Festival of Literature.
The poem was published posthumously as the title piece of If I Must Die: Poetry and Prose (OR Books, 2024), compiled by Yousef M. Aljamal, and is reproduced here with the text published by the Academy of American Poets by permission of the Alareer estate.