Featured Poet: Nasser Rabah
Nasser Rabah was born in Gaza in 1963, and earned his BA in Agricultural Science in 1985 before going on to work as director of the Communication Department in the Agriculture Ministry. He is a member of the Palestinian Writers and Authors Union, and has published five collections of poetry — Running After Dead Gazelles (2003), One of Nobody (2010), Passersby with Invisible Clothes (2013), Water Thirsty for Water (2016), and Eulogy for the Robin (2020) — and a novel, Since Approximately an Hour (2018). Some of his poems have been translated into English, French, and Hebrew, and have appeared in The Los Angeles Review of Books, Poetry Online and Two Lines, among others.
An Introduction:
Nasser Rabah's poetry contains powerful metaphors that resonate with the reader long after the page has been turned: a bird alighting on a wall, a gazelle stepping out of a painting, a dusty photo in a frame — images that linger, juxtaposed against a sparse reality in which, ironically, "the water was water." Since the war between Gaza and Israel began in October, Rabah has appeared infrequently on social media; his exact whereabouts are unknown. But his words are here on the page, transcending borders.
The poems have been translated collectively by Joanna Chen, Julie Yelle, and Mosab Abu Toha.
Untitled
A journey runs and a clock stops.
A river gathers up its belongings in my punctured pocket.
Night gnaws at my days, takes its leave, and a clock stops.
Cities inhale gunpowder and fatigue, dreaming of birds.
No flag flutters for me,
No bird alights upon the window.
I am a clock on the wall.
The Evening of Others
Undoubtedly you pass by from time to time
As a sparrow or a crow, you hover over the garden fence,
Afraid we will see you and your fading memory.
I know you revisit the mirror to see how we have changed.
You survey your own face, no longer caring about time passed.
The houses you behold no longer see you.
Streets have names you never knew,
And passersby no longer recognize you.
The trees you watered with your yearning every morning
Have become telephone poles.
Your morning is the morning of others.
Your evening is the evening of others,
And we frequently set traps for birds.
Untitled
In war, dejection devours the houses.
They converse with themselves,
walk to the sea, alone, weary of it all.
They return, they bury their heads
In the hustle of the city.
In war, bombs wound the houses,
and like people, they die of gangrene.
Untitled
1.
A cypress dreamed
that clouds were flirting with it.
The cypress longed for them
and extended a branch.
But the clouds crossing the sky
were in love with the stream,
shared by the earth.
2.
I dreamed you were a rose in my hand,
and in the morning, I waited and waited.
No one knocked at my door,
nor did the phone ring.
Only the evening came to shut the window,
downcast, content with a poem.
3.
By the time the knock at the door came, I was dead.
Who’s there? asked my photo in the frame.
It is me, I said. I came back to wipe the dust off you.
Prose Poetry
A flock of vocabulary jostles at my window, hammers at my door. I hide under a pillow of vacuity, of emptiness.
I want to be innocent of every line I ever wrote, I want to cry on every hand that ever hovered over the cover of a book. A flock of vocabulary jostles at my window, hammers at my heart.
Luminescent music flows from the clock, the tired painting, the drinking glasses, flows from our trifling hands caught in a sudden embrace, flows from the ceiling of the room like blue rain, drenching us with unending songs, a love that everyone talks of, but no one has seen.
So does love resemble you, oh God?
Every night the gazelle in the painting descends, pauses to graze in the meadow of my dreams, drinks tears from the palms of my hands and carries my sigh to a faraway house in the hills beyond. It is not strange, this disconcertion, and I sleep through my dream like a fragrant herb on the edge of a garden, like fatigue in the dead of night, nor is it strange that the gazelle brushes past me when I invoke her name — breathless from singing, giddy with audacity.
Oh longing: do not linger shyly on the doorstep. You were never absent, never a fleeting visitor. Oh one who stretches out like a grape trellis, you eat the air whenever we breathe, you drink the forgotten dew, the stories and words left behind after evening has slipped away, here oh longing, here I sit you down, flipping through the notebook of family trees, pictures of birds, and you here, oh longing, excavate my silence.
I know that when I leave the house things return to their natural state: a debris of questions crawls up the walls, a library swims across the table.
They passed you by, all of them —
the handsome ones, the ugly ones, the innocent, the evil, the mattresses, songs, rivers, wishes, the dead passing like water through a basket of straw.
The water was water, the basket shimmered.