Mosab Abu Toha
Mosab Abu Toha is a Palestinian poet, shortstory 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 in Poetry and won a Palestine Book Award, an American Book Award, and the Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry. Abu Toha is also the founder ofthe Edward Said Library in Gaza, which he hopes to rebuild. He recently won an Overseas Press Club Award and a Pulitzer Prize in Commentary for his essays on Gaza in The New Yorker.
What is Home?
– Mosab Abu Toha
What is home:
it is the shade of trees on my way to school
before they were uprooted.
It is my grandparents’ black-and-white wedding
photo before the walls crumbled.
It is my uncle’s prayer rug, where dozens of ants
slept on wintry nights, before it was looted and
put in a museum.
It is the oven my mother used to bake bread and
roast chicken before a bomb reduced our house
to ashes.
It is the café where I watched football matches
and played—
My child stops me: Can a four-letter word hold
all of these?
Published on Poets.org. From Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear by Mosab Abu Toha. Copyright © 2022 by Mosab Abu Toha.