Gaza has become a funeral home,
but there are no seats,
no mourners, no bodies.
In the caskets are nothing but
what remained of the dead’s clothes,
and on the crumbling walls are clocks
that have not moved for fourteen months.
Copyright © 2025 by Mosab Abu Toha. Published by permission of the author.
Terrified past panic, strict lines collapsed,
their shredded flesh more wound than flesh,
they play dead in a ditch, but won’t give up
their shrouds, which have grown on them.
Then the angels come, oiling eye sockets, joints,
and stuffing everyone’s armpits, left or right,
with an item they failed to desecrate in life.
This way, something saved remains warm,
and God’s hands don’t get cold, as He sorts
the good ones from the ones who’ve spoiled.
From Departures from Rilke (Arrowsmith Press, 2023) by Steven Cramer. Copyright © 2023 by Steven Cramer. Used with the permission of the author and publisher.
My mother is a fish, Vardaman repeats, in Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, as his family builds his dying mother’s coffin. My favorite novel in college. It comes back now. On the beach on my pink bike wearing my mother’s too tight bathing suit I ride as fast as I can past dead fish after dead fish, choked by the algae. Deprived of oxygen, they must have thrown their bodies gasping on the sand. Like my mother, I think, unable to breathe, dying, and then am aghast at my own terrible metaphor, which she would hate. If I waded out in the water, color of rust, color of blood, if I let the water close over my head, would that lessen the distance between us?
Copyright © 2022 by Nicole Cooley. This poem was first printed in Court Green, Issue 21 (Fall 2022). Used with the permission of the author.
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O, no! it is an ever-fixed mark,
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error, and upon me prov’d,
I never writ, nor no man ever lov’d.
This poem is in the public domain.
It’s dusk on a Tuesday in June. A hot wind
bears down and east. In my room, a stranger’s
hairclip lies like a gilded insect beside the sink.
Hours later, it’s still dusk; it will be dusk all night.
Last month, I cut the masking tape from a box my mother left
my sister and me. On the lid, she wrote, Life is hard, not
unbeatable. If I can do it, darlings, so can you. 2 am. A rosy dark
dusting the window, the heat a ladder into sleep.
Copyright © 2019 by Chloe Honum. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on May 15, 2019, by the Academy of American Poets
The silence is broken: into the nature
My soul sails out,
Carrying the song of life on his brow,
To meet the flowers and birds.
When my heart returns in the solitude,
She is very sad,
Looking back on the dead passions
Lying on Love’s ruin.
I am like a leaf
Hanging over hope and despair,
Which trembles and joins
The world’s imagination and ghost.
This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on December 28, 2019, by the Academy of American Poets.
I went down to the river,
I set down on the bank.
I tried to think but couldn't,
So I jumped in and sank.
I came up once and hollered!
I came up twice and cried!
If that water hadn't a-been so cold
I might've sunk and died.
But it was Cold in that water! It was cold!
I took the elevator
Sixteen floors above the ground.
I thought about my baby
And thought I would jump down.
I stood there and I hollered!
I stood there and I cried!
If it hadn't a-been so high
I might've jumped and died.
But it was High up there! It was high!
So since I'm still here livin',
I guess I will live on.
I could've died for love—
But for livin' I was born
Though you may hear me holler,
And you may see me cry—
I'll be dogged, sweet baby,
If you gonna see me die.
Life is fine! Fine as wine! Life is fine!
From The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, published by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. Copyright © 1994 the Estate of Langston Hughes. Used with permission.
Although she feeds me bread of bitterness,
And sinks into my throat her tiger’s tooth,
Stealing my breath of life, I will confess
I love this cultured hell that tests my youth!
Her vigor flows like tides into my blood,
Giving me strength erect against her hate.
Her bigness sweeps my being like a flood.
Yet as a rebel fronts a king in state,
I stand within her walls with not a shred
Of terror, malice, not a word of jeer.
Darkly I gaze into the days ahead,
And see her might and granite wonders there,
Beneath the touch of Time’s unerring hand,
Like priceless treasures sinking in the sand.
From Harlem Shadows (New York, Harcourt, Brace and company, 1922) by Claude McKay. This poem is in the public domain.
(“Three bills known as the Thompson-Bewley cannery bills have been advanced to third reading in the Senate and Assembly at Albany. One permits the canners to work their employés seven days a week, a second allows them to work women after 9 p.m. and a third removes every restriction upon the hours of labor of women and minors.”—Zenas L. Potter, former chief cannery investigator for New York State Factory Investigating Commission.)
Let us not to an unrestricted day
Impediments admit. Work is not work
To our employés, but a merry play;
They do not ask the law’s excuse to shirk.
Ah, no, the canning season is at hand,
When summer scents are on the air distilled,
When golden fruits are ripening in the land,
And silvery tins are gaping to be filled.
Now to the cannery with jocund mien
Before the dawn come women, girls and boys,
Whose weekly hours (a hundred and nineteen)
Seem all too short for their industrious joys.
If this be error and be proved, alas
The Thompson-Bewley bills may fail to pass!
This poem is in the public domain.
An eye from the Creator,
a fire, bright, setting slowly
over the cusp of the “new world,”
kissing the Old World, softly
to sleep, it is the kissing that is soft,
not the sleeping.
Under the light of that unwanted dawn there is
a warrior still left standing, we
war-journey them
to the battle and back,
to the battle and back,
to the battle and back,
radiance, felt through the
water that flows blue but runs red,
around and around
that quickly setting sun,
around and around
a circle, there are
songs for the way our warriors
used to honorably drift away
We used to die in battle
but today they ring out
— “whatchu tryna tell me?”
while we slosh a bottle around,
we laugh about how we are singing
Songs from the wrong eagles,
our war journey is through the hills
with the windows down
In a red ford with
the tribal tag torn
and a car battery in the front seat
We are nurtured,
Remembered,
by the birds who fly
around and around
while we hit our hands
on the hoods of clunkers
and when it stops being sacred,
We laugh,
We funk #49,
here we live,
here we are live.
We laugh,
my warrior, we aren’t
the warriors, of anything
like that, anymore.
Copyright © 2025 by Lily Painter. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on February 6, 2025, by the Academy of American Poets.
and you used to be The Richard Bey Show
and my sister’s spaghetti. Under a friar plum tree,
a simplified reading of “The Argonautica.”
You kept me full and entertained. I was that kind
of round child. Gorging on what was left over.
I didn’t want a real burden, my own ship or story.
I didn’t want to go on ahead. I didn’t want to
have to reverse into you. Into your apparatus.
I never wanted nostalgia. We used to know each other,
remember? Dry. Humid. Dry. Humid.
Not. Humid. Dry. Humid. Dry. Humid. Dry.
Why did we have to pry open our patch of dirt?
Why couldn’t you always be acid wash
or those I CAN’T DRIVE 55 posters at the swap meet
or sunglasses. I never wanted to lay questions around
you. What if he takes another this year? What if
he’s difficult to talk my way out of? What if he eats me
only half-alive? What if all he is in his beach bum
orange is ghosts clothespinned to the laundry line?
Copyright © 2023 by Gustavo Hernandez. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on March 8, 2023, by the Academy of American Poets.
In Iraq,
after a thousand and one nights,
someone will talk to someone else.
Markets will open
for regular customers.
Small feet will tickle
the giant feet of the Tigris.
Gulls will spread their wings
and no one will fire at them.
Women will walk the streets
without looking back in fear.
Men will give their real names
without putting their lives at risk.
Children will go to school
and come home again.
Chickens in the villages
won’t peck at human flesh
on the grass.
Disputes will take place
without any explosives.
A cloud will pass over cars
heading to work as usual.
A hand will wave
to someone leaving
or returning.
The sunrise will be the same
for those who wake
and those who never will.
And every moment
something ordinary
will happen
under the sun.
Copyright © 2014 by Dunya Mikhail. From The Iraqi Nights (New Directions, 2014), translated from the Arabic by Kareem James Abu-Zeid. Reprinted from Split This Rock’s The Quarry: A Social Justice Poetry Database.
After Iqbal
Brother on the threshing floor, body like wheat,
and the red dirt that binds us, that nothing will release us
from. The fig tree, the date palm, the treacherous murder
unleashed into us now, the call blazing from vanity’s lungs,
jutting us to a future of mindless rain, wayward blizzards
of sand and snow. We were born to ward off this desolation
that grinds mountains into floss, bores into our books
for a whim that ordains blood, our blood
and others, our sisters, mothers. Without such fear
who will we be? What will we do without
this aching chord, without the bright morning that tore
the silver’s towers? Fire and the parched red dirt
that binds, the water stolen from our wells,
a black magic dredging the lower rungs of earth.
We dream of clover. The soft scent of young lambs
is the first letter of our alphabet, and the prophets
who tighten ropes around their waists to stifle hunger's
pangs, supplicant brows seeking light from earth’s core.
What will we do without the angel’s voice, a tide
sending us heavenward, a harmattan ushering us into the hell
of its lows. How can we live without such turbulent hope?
How can we accept the certainty of our quiet graves?
How can we stop waiting to witness the Lord’s face?
And what will we do without the hardened gaze?
The girls walk past, hair fluttering like commas
between poems of musk, a dream of touch like water
gently falling on smooth, warm stone.
What will we do without the anemones’ mournful dirge
stroking the dagger’s spine and the gelding’s nightmares.
Our hatred for our scoured hands, our love of the moment
when the sun drops only for our eyes? Who else will hear
birdsong as prayer, who will cleanse himself with the stroke
of sand? Who keeps the earth rotating with praise
of your name? And what will this spinning,
hurtling mean without our voices shouldering it
toward some ripe, sweetened pause?
What will you do, dear God, without us? How
will you fare, alone again in the empty vast, in the dark
of your creation, without us giving you your name?
Copyright © 2019 by Khaled Mattawa. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on August 20, 2019, by the Academy of American Poets.
This spice mix is featured in many of the dishes in this book, lending them a uniquely Palestinian flavor.
—Reem Kassis, “The Palestinian Table”
First they tango on my tongue,
nimble couples careening,
then together
form an Arab-style line dance
stepping, stomping, swaying.
West Indies allspice dazzles,
berries tangling with cinnamon sticks,
while cloves, Indonesian natives,
lead with a spirited solidarity solo.
Coriander seeds offer greetings in Hindi
as others toast comrades in languages
beyond borders and blockades.
Lifting up sisterhood, sun-wizened nutmeg
starts a sibling dance with mace.
Cumin demurs, then surprises
with subtle exultation.
Queen of spices cardamom,
host of the party, gives a nod to flavors
in hiding: lemony, sweet, warm,
fragrant, nutty, pungent, hot.
Encouraged, feisty black peppercorns
shimmy center stage, organizing
the unique union of nine
for a vivacious global salute.
Copyright © 2022 by Zeina Azzam. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on April 7, 2022, by the Academy of American Poets.
I am taken with the hot animal
of my skin, grateful to swing my limbs
and have them move as I intend, though
my knee, though my shoulder, though something
is torn or tearing. Today, a dozen squid, dead
on the harbor beach: one mostly buried,
one with skin empty as a shell and hollow
feeling, and, though the tentacles look soft,
I do not touch them. I imagine they
were startled to find themselves in the sun.
I imagine the tide simply went out
without them. I imagine they cannot
feel the black flies charting the raised hills
of their eyes. I write my name in the sand:
Donika Kelly. I watch eighteen seagulls
skim the sandbar and lift low in the sky.
I pick up a pebble that looks like a green egg.
To the ditch lily I say I am in love.
To the Jeep parked haphazardly on the narrow
street I am in love. To the roses, white
petals rimmed brown, to the yellow lined
pavement, to the house trimmed in gold I am
in love. I shout with the rough calculus
of walking. Just let me find my way back,
let me move like a tide come in.
Copyright © 2017 by Donika Kelly. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on November 20, 2017, by the Academy of American Poets.
translated from the Arabic by Khaled Mattawa
Alone, now you are free.
You pick a sky and name it
a sky to live in
a sky to refuse
But if you want know
if you are really free
and to remain free
you must steady yourself
on a foothold of earth
so that the earth may rise
so that you may give
wings
to the children of earth
below
Copyright © 2019 by Khaled Mattawa. Reprinted with the permission of Khaled Mattawa.