"Gaza’s Poetry: A Cry for Humanity in Times of Genocide"

In 2018, I founded the Gaza Poets Society, the first spoken word community in Gaza, with a vision to create a cultural hub for young, talented poets, artists, and writers. Starting with 30 members, our community has grown steadily, especially in recent years.The Gaza Poets Society was established to provide a platform for young poets, artists, and stand-up comedians in Gaza. I organized monthly spoken word events, including Gaza Youth Speaks (2018), Hymns of Peace (2018), and Our Dreams Matter (2019). We collected poems shared during our weekly meetings and online gatherings, compiling them into anthologies. In 2019, we published our first anthology, Love and Loss, a groundbreaking collection of poetry written in English by young Gazan poets—not translated, but original works. This was a significant milestone, amplifying the voices of Gaza’s youth on a global stage.Finding a physical space in Gaza to meet, exchange poems, and connect with international poets was a constant challenge due to the city’s ongoing siege and recurrent conflicts. These conditions left us feeling isolated from the world, but our connections and meetings opened windows to poetry and perspectives beyond the wars surrounding our besieged city. By partnering with local organizations to host us, we created spaces for dialogue and creativity.This was always an individual effort, driven by a desire to build something that reflected our identity as young, free, and fierce. We aimed to offer a space where poets, especially women—who formed the majority of our community—could freely discuss politics, society, and everything in between. Despite logistical challenges, continuous wars, and the lack of funding, we managed to meet and share poetry.

Because it's something we love, belive in, and cherish.

Before the genocide, the Gaza Poets Society was a sanctuary where poets could escape the harsh realities of Gaza—unemployment, siege, and conflict—and express themselves freely and feerlessly. The creative work produced in this cultural space was extraordinary, beautiful, and powerful. Though we only published two anthologies and organized three poetry events at the time due to limited resources, the impact was profound. We hoped for funding and support to do more, but our efforts remained self-sustained.The lack of on-the-ground support made it essential to continue our work online, fostering connections between Gazan poets and international poets to strengthen global ties. This vision culminated in our third anthology, My Death is Not a Song, published in 2025. The Gaza Poets Society became a pioneering space where poets wrote in English and Arabic, exchanged ideas, and engaged in weekly meetings and monthly spoken word events. We also created media to showcase the journey of our young poets, a vital endeavor at the time.Over the years, much has changed. The harsh realities of Gaza forced us to become an online community, but our impact has only grown. From 30 members, we’ve expanded to include over 100 poets, with new voices continually joining to share their work, especially in English, speaking directly to the world. While the challenges of the past eight years persist, the essence of our unique literary community in Gaza remains unchanged: a vibrant, resilient space for creativity and connection.

To me, losing a city is like being struck blind. When the landmarks of your city—those sacred corners of memory—crumble into dust, it’s as if the light of your past is snuffed out. The streets where you laughed as a child, the walls that held your youth’s dreams, the places that anchored your heart to Gaza—they vanish. And with them, pieces of you disappear too.Each demolished building takes a fragment of your story, erasing the moments that shaped you. The café where you whispered secrets, the alley where you chased fleeting joys, the home where your childhood bloomed—they’re gone, reduced to rubble. Without them, your memories blur, like a painting washed away by rain. You reach for the city in your mind, but it’s no longer there as it was. You’re left grasping at shadows, unable to see the Gaza you once knew.To lose a city is to lose your sight—not of the eyes, but of the soul. It’s a blindness that steals the colors of your youth, the warmth of your memories, and the places that made you whole. Oh, how it aches—this unbearable grief of a city erased, leaving you to wander in the dark, mourning what once was and can never be again.

I struggle to find words for this. How do you frame a genocide in Gaza as poetry? How do you weave carnage into verses when the very act feels like betrayal? Nothing about this devastation is poetic, nothing romantic about the bloodshed and ruin that engulfs us.So, I speak plainly, as I would to anyone, letting the words spill raw and unadorned. I refuse to dress this pain in metaphors or polish it with rhyme. Instead, I grasp the language with a wounded hand, my heart shattered, trying to hold the anger, the grief, the unbearable weight of it all. I starve the poem, strip it bare, and see if something true can emerge from the wreckage—if poetry can be squeezed from this raw, bleeding wound.Yet, exposing these wounds risks deepening them. Each word cuts anew, lays bare the suffering. But perhaps, in this act of speaking, of forcing the world to hear, there’s a path to healing—not to soften the pain, but to let it breathe, to let it be witnessed.

I’m not sure poetry can confront the madness tearing through Gaza. I doubt words can capture the horrors etched into the lives of its people—the gnawing starvation in a child’s empty stomach, the weary shuffle of feet scouring for scraps, the icy chill of lifeless bodies left in queues for water or food, or buried beneath the rubble of their homes. Can language even make sense of such devastation?Yet, maybe poetry can do something else. Maybe it can pierce the silence, make you listen closer, feel deeper. It reaches into the soul, stirs the mind, and forces you to sit with the wounds of Gaza’s people—their pain, their loss, their unrelenting grief. Poetry doesn’t need to solve the horror; it needs to match its depth, to narrate the unutterable with raw, unflinching truth, and to carry the weight of their suffering into the hearts of those who dare to hear.

It’s a quiet miracle to watch your poems slip past borders, languages, and political walls, reaching places you’ve never set foot in. They carry Gaza’s heart to the world, and in return, the world embraces your cause as its own. The weight of your pain, once crushing, feels a fraction lighter when shared. The love and solidarity pouring in from strangers across the globe—people who hold your sorrow as if it were theirs—reignite a flickering faith in humanity. That hope, buried deep beneath Gaza’s rubble, begins to stir again, hard to name but impossible to ignore.