This poem is set to appear in Nasser Rabah’s Gaza: The Poem Said Its Piece, which is available for pre-order from City Lights, and appears here with permission. Coming April 2025.
I Was Sand
By Nasser Rabah
Translated by Ammiel Alcalay, Emna Zghal, Khaled Al-Hilli
I was sand gently grazed by grass woven through me.
Clouds pass me over, or girls as they come out the gate
of a nearby school. Rain and hail wash me, and the sun
and plows bear down on me in their dull movement over
a wheat field in the far-flung reaches of a nondescript village.
I was sand, like any other, so ordained for my simplicity
that time was of no concern to me, nor distance, nor the
passersby. One afternoon — I only remember it now sticking
its back out like a nail on a wall — I didn’t see them when they
brought the water to mix with my sand and I fainted. I only found
out the truth about myself years after my horrific awakening,
staring at a single scene, repeating over and over.
I realized that I’d become a stone in a prison cell.
A stone staring at a blind man’s wall hours on end, counting
its days by the wounds prisoners etched on its cold silence,
by the departing dead, by those coming in carrying on their
broken backs a suitcase of hope. Hope I left behind,
scattered on an afternoon of a far, far‑flung field.
Nasser Rabah was born in Gaza in 1963. He got 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 (2011); Passersby with Light Clothes (2014); Water Thirsty for Water (2017); Eulogy for the Robin (2021), and two novels, Since Approximately an Hour (2018), and The Enclosure of the Gazelle (2024). Some of his poems have been translated into English, French and Hebrew. He lives in Gaza.
The collection was translated by Ammiel Alcalay, Emna Zghal, and Khaled Al-Hilli.
Image courtesy Heinrich Böll Foundation Palestine & Jordan.