Running Orders
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.
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Recording: WordsWest Literary Series
They call us now. Before they drop the bombs. The phone rings and someone who knows my first name calls and says in perfect Arabic “This is David.”
(excerpt)
About this poem
Lena Khalaf Tuffaha wrote “Running Orders” in July 2014, during Israel’s seven-week assault on Gaza, after reports that the Israeli military was telephoning families — the caller introducing himself as “David” — to tell them they had minutes before their homes would be bombed. Shared online, the poem spread around the world within days; it has since been translated into Hebrew, Greek, Italian, Spanish, and Norwegian, and performed at anti-war protests.
The poem was collected in Tuffaha’s debut book, Water & Salt (Red Hen Press, 2017), winner of the 2018 Washington State Book Award, and anthologized in Letters to Palestine: Writers Respond to War and Occupation (Verso, 2015).