5 Poems You Need to Read From Palestinian Pulitzer Winner Mosab Abu Toha

At a time when the news offers little other than tragic headlines and misery-packed reports, Mosab Abu Toha’s Pulitzer win feels like a breath of fresh air. The 32-year-old Palestinian author, who is originally from Gaza, was awarded this week for his series of works published inside American multi-platform publication The New Yorker.

In total, four pieces of writing were recognized: Requiem for a Refugee Camp, The Gaza We Leave Behind, The Pain of Traveling While Palestinian, and My Family’s Daily Struggle to Find Food in Gaza. Each centered on the daily realities and suffering of the people of Gaza in the aftermath of the events of Oct. 7, 2023, Abu Toha’s poems were praised for their ability to “combine deep reporting with the intimacy of memoir to convey the Palestinian experience of more than a year and a half of war,” the Pulitzer committee said in a statement.

“I have just won a Pulitzer Prize for Commentary,” Abu Toha commented on his win on X. “Let it bring hope/ Let it be a tale,” he added.

Born in 1992 in the Al-Shati refugee camp, Abu Toha has long used poetry as a means of resistance; a form of survival through language in a place where erasure and cultural silencing are routine. Brought up amidst all the violence and rubble caused by occupying colonial forces, the recent laureate has used his voice, and pen, to document the toll of living under siege while much of the world continues to look away.

With words in many leading publications— including The Atlantic and The New York Review of Books— and experiences among some of the academic field’s most respected institutions such as Harvard and Syracuse, the young writer is slowly breaking into mainstream literary circles, bringing the Palestinian narrative to spaces that have long overlooked it.

my grandfather used to count the days for return with his fingers

he then used stones to count

not enough

he used the clouds birds people

absence turned out to be too long

thirty six years until he died

for us now it is over seventy years

my grandpa lost his memory

he forgot the numbers the people

he forgot home

i wish i were with you grandpa

i would have taught myself to write you

poems volumes of them and paint our home for you

i would have sewn you from soil

a garment decorated with plants

and trees you had grown

i would have made you

perfume from the oranges

and soap from the skys tears of joy

couldnt think of something purer

III

i go to the cemetery every day

i look for your grave but in vain

are they sure they buried you

or did you turn into a tree

or perhaps you flew with a bird to the nowhere

i place your photo in an earthenware pot

i water it every monday and thursday at sunset

i was told you used to fast those days

in ramadan i water it every day

for thirty days

or less or more

how big do you want our home to be

i can continue to write poems until you are satisfied

if you wish i can annex a neighboring planet or two

for this home i shall not draw boundaries

no punctuation marks

Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear

When you open my ear, touch it

gently.

My mother’s voice lingers somewhere inside.

Her voice is the echo that helps recover my equilibrium

when I feel dizzy during my attentiveness.

You may encounter songs in Arabic,

poems in English I recite to myself,

or a song I chant to the chirping birds in our backyard.

When you stitch the cut, don’t forget to put all these back in my ear.

Put them back in order as you would do with books on your shelf.

The drone’s buzzing sound,

the roar of an F-16,

the screams of bombs falling on houses,

on fields, and on bodies,

of rockets flying away—

rid my small ear canal of them all.

Spray the perfume of your smiles on the incision.

Inject the song of life into my veins to wake me up.

Gently beat the drum so my mind may dance with yours,

my doctor, day and night.

Memories Are Flowers

Memories are Flowers—
We water them,
narrate them,
turn them into poems
into plays,
into stories.

We decorate them with
light bulbs,
with metaphors
of different hues,
in variant clubs.

Some memories are nasty.
They have rank smells,
and coarse, prickly skin.

No matter how deeply
inhumed the bones,
the worm of sweet memories
shall find their way.

Untitled

A father wakes up at night, sees
the random colors on the walls
drawn by his four year old son.
But he’s dead after an airstrike.

The colors are about 4 feet high.
Next year, they would be 5 or 6.
But the painter is dead and the
museum has no new
paintings to show.

A Rose Shoulders Up

Don’t ever be surprised
to see a rose shoulder up
among the ruins of the house:
This is how we survived.

5 Poems You Need to Read From Palestinian Pulitzer Winner Mosab Abu Toha

my grandfather and home

Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear

Memories Are Flowers

Untitled

A Rose Shoulders Up

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5 Poems You Need to Read From Palestinian Pulitzer Winner Mosab Abu Toha

my grandfather and home

Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear

Memories Are Flowers

Untitled

A Rose Shoulders Up

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