The Longest Poem

In “The Definition of Poetry,” Destiny O. Birdsong’s interview with Palestinian poet Mosah Abu Toha, whose second poetry collection, Forest of Noise, was published by Knopf on October 15, Abu Toha talks about the feeling of responsibility to write about what he sees at this moment in time. “It’s my duty as a poet to document everything that I see,” he says.

It would be a gross understatement to say that he has seen a lot. “Most of my life I spent in Gaza, and between 2008 and the ongoing genocide, I’ve survived at least five [near-death experiences] with my family,” he says. “When you are in the middle of a dangerous experience, you are writing about things that are very immediate: air strikes, the bombing of your house, the murder of your friends. I lost thirty-one members of my extended family in one air strike in October [2023]. So the intensity of what’s happening sometimes prevents you from reflecting on certain experiences, because this loss is never-ending.”

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Later in the interview, Birdsong asks the poet what writers, particularly non-Palestinian writers, can do in response to what is happening. He replies: “What I’m thinking right now as I’m answering your question is that anyone who calls themselves a true poet should think of collaborating with other poets in their community and work on writing the longest poem in history. … Each poet could contribute two lines based on a picture or a feeling they had watching and witnessing what has happened in the past [year]. They don’t have to sign their names, and it could be anyone who wants to write poetry, because poetry is not about poets. It’s about everyone who can express something. ... It’s not enough to witness. It’s also good—it’s important, it’s imperative—to take a stance by writing what you see.”

Below is the beginning of just such a poem, which starts with two lines written by Mosab Abu Toha specifically for this project, which he will curate and sequence. If you would like to submit your own lines to be considered, e-mail a couplet to thelongestpoem@pw.org along with your name, if you would like it to be included; your contribution can also remain anonymous.

The Longest Poem

In bombed Gaza, the air was so scarce
that I could feel it laboring up my nose.

In the putrefying odor of the dead
their voices lament it’s not about who is right but in what’s left.

Instinctively my body bends with the blast 
hands reaching into the earth that birthed me.

Sanctuaries on window sills no longer exist for doves in Gaza
They seek asylum from the deadly decimation from which their wings cannot free them.

The word is the body. The body is the child. The word gone, body torn. My passport, a bomb.
Crow screeches at our vigil near the sea as we read the names of the dead. The sea & the river, oh Palestine

We scroll and swipe to watch buildings and people burn on our phone. 
We take the pocket size thunder and screams and suffering with us to work, having pocket sized panic attacks every time we think about  it. 

Every time as people die we die a little inside but it is very superficial, just a small humanity death. The real thunder and the real screams and the real suffering is not pocket sized. 
Their death is not superficial.

Everything is tainted with the shades of death splattered on broken screens
Another child’s last breath seeping through the cracks.

Diaspora: Jesus, Einstein, Marx, and Freud—
that’s what Jews do.

I set an ear to ringing earth
hoping the dead will know my listening.

His last breath rose into her
last breath, into theirs, then gone.

Images flash by on a phone screen
Daring us to turn from the desecration.

A clench of my gut muscles, that sharp squirt
of adrenaline reminds me to write this down.

My chest aches with ancestor blood.
How I struggle transforming its pulse into love. 

The pages of (y)our history trapped
like severed wings beneath the rubble.

I try to recall the recent summer and cannot; my mind a ledge hovering
above a protective void of cottoned nothingness, vast and possibly infinite. 

He stands in the wreckage of the bombed-out refugee camp center. 
His mouth slowly opens and screams “I didn’t do anything wrong!”

Sorrow beyond imagining—loss never ending—
The suffering hope of a different tomorrow waits—
For the coming of Love never ending.

If only our words, so carefully chosen, could raise even one child
from the rubble, and give her breath.

That day we shared a morsel, a sip, an embrace. 
Then memories became embers and dissipated like molecules.

We hit pause on the video of the fire, but the child has already burned.
Next video, in this endless feed, a candidate asserts—Israel has a right to self defense—there is no pause button.

Everything that could ever happen to a child
has happened to the children of Gaza.

The ache is lesser my ache, for the distance affects the pain. But the eyes of the children sear deeply into my soul and the miles disintegrate.
Their innocence cannot bear the rawness of their reality, and I fall to my knees for want to take their pain away.

Peace is not in the cease fire
where bodies lay wasted amid the rubble.

It is in the promise that we won’t return to violence
again and again and again.

Even here, we breathe the soot under feet
from homes, no longer there.

When the oppressed oppress, it is still wrong, Free Palestine.
God does not speak through a bullet or bomb, Free Palestine.  

If you want to pray to survive 
Go ahead—I’m so damaged, I contemplate suicide,
My babies, my babies once by my side,
Bombed to death,
These savage, ugly acts,
Rage and embattle my head.

This genocide is not impossible to stop
until you and I decide we can no longer try.

I see comfortable people who live in comfortable houses unthreatened on stolen land
Post pictures of themselves happily dancing with politicians with no interest in arresting the slaughter.

Nakba. Kristallnacht. An Gorta Mór. Darfur. Choeung Ek. Marias River.
Names and places speak in different dialects. Genocide uses one voice.  

Hospital under siege, premature babies unconscionably displaced
Only demonic evil could be so brutally savage.

Nurse dutifully jots identification on a lifeless child
Her cold belly diminished to an ink-covered canvas.

Sister, I don’t recognize you: hair overnight gray as ashes.
But wait, it is ashes—your long dark braid, ashes! 

An arm reaching skyward while flames consume the body, my death is not
my own, is not yours, is for the right to live and be joyful, full stop.

Gaza. My heart bleeds
For the children who are no more. 

Starved by governments of the insane,
My heart eats my heart, its only nourishment.

Where do we hide when the bullets and tears do not stop?
I hide inside my breathless heart where shadows do not weep.

We watch from far away the long days and nights of destruction
as they scroll, a hellfire, on our screens. But ceaseless rescuers dig 
and dig and dig.

What we learned of suffering cannot be
confined to a continent, a death bed.

In the home of the brave and the land of the free
We shudder at our complicity. 

The Sky of Gaza once filled with blue kindness, is now a graveyard of unclaimed dreams
with the names of those you do not know, with a face you don’t bother to recall.

They still scrape DNA off the rubble of the Twin Towers to notify kin.
Will anyone look for DNA in Gaza, so rhetorically the question, my heart bursts.

Inside the horror shines a tiny ray of light
Survive Witness Hope.

The images. They haunt me.
I do not understand them.

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