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Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear
for Alicia M. Quesnel, MD
I.
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.
II.
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.
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Mosab Abu Toha is a Palestinian poet, short-story writer, and essayist from Gaza. His first collection of poetry, Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry and won the Palestine Book Award, the American Book Award, and the Walcott Poetry Prize. Abu Toha is also the founder of the Edward Said Library in Gaza. He recently won an Overseas Press Club Award for his “Letter from Gaza” columns for The New Yorker. His writings from Gaza have appeared in The Nation, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, and The New York Review, among others. His second poetry book, Forest of Noise, is forthcoming from Knopf in October 2024. [Author photo credit: Mohamed Mahdy]
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Sliman Mansour, Mother and Her Child (أم وطفلها), oil on canvas, 2016.
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Author: Terence Winch
