Memory2022

On a Starless Night

Mosab Abu Toha

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.

I look out my window. The house next door no longer stands. It’s lying like an old carpet on the floor of the earth, trampled by missiles, fat slippers flying off legless feet.

(excerpt)

About this poem

“On a Starless Night” comes from Mosab Abu Toha’s debut collection Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear: Poems from Gaza (City Lights Books, 2022). The poem compresses an air strike into domestic detail: the narrator is shaken out of bed, looks out the window, and finds the house next door flattened — and it is only in the ruins that he learns the intimate facts of his neighbors’ lives: “I never knew my neighbors still had that small TV, / that old painting still hung on their walls, / their cat had kittens.”

The collection — written between four Israeli assaults on Gaza, in which Abu Toha grew up and was raising his own children — won the Palestine Book Award and the American Book Award and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. The poem was reprinted in Poems for Palestine, a free anthology booklet published by ArabLit and ArabLit Quarterly in November 2023.

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