Prologue: For Those Who Mother Without Map or Margin
These poems are stitched from many lives, many voices, both real and remembered. Though written in the first person, they are never only mine. They echo the grief, resistance, and devotion of Palestinian women and mothers across generations and time, the ones who held keys and folded flags, who told stories and raised daughters to speak back. I wrote them with the belief that survival is collective and memory is an inheritance, especially when erasure is policy. These poems would not exist without the fire and tenderness of the women I walk alongside today—those who teach me, love me, and dream aloud with me. This is not a singular voice; it is a chorus, rooted in the past, witnessing the present, and speaking into a future we refuse to surrender.
I. Before the Fire Had a Name
I had figs in my fists and salt in my braid.
Before borders cut the sky, I knew only the hills.
We baked bread at dawn, feet planted in the soil
as if we were trees, not women.
They said I was stubborn.
I said I was staying.
II. The Dress I Buried, the Key I Kept
I wrapped my wedding dress in an oilcloth.
Carried my baby and the house key.
The road out was not a road
just dirt and grief.
They burned the books, but I remembered every line.
They took the land, but not my language.
III. Labor Under Siege
I gave birth in blackout.
The midwife lit a match to see if I was tearing.
My son was born between drones and debris.
I counted his fingers while the wall shook.
They say Gaza is unlivable.
But what they mean is that it is still alive.
IV. Grammar of the Tents
There are no straight lines in the camp.
Just tin walls, smoke, and stubborn children.
I teach my daughters resistance
in three languages
the fourth is silence,
which I warn them never to use.
V. What We Keep Safe
In a cold room lined with quiet machines,
I signed the forms with steady hands.
My body, tender from the injections,
held a future no one could name yet.
I told no one—not even my mother.
Some things we do in silence,
like prayer.
Some things we preserve
because the world has a habit
of burning what we build.
They say it’s science.
But I call it an act of remembering.
A way to say:
Not everything will be lost.
Not this time.
VI. The Closest I’ve Been to Return
I stood behind the barricade
not to stop her, but to witness.
My daughter, keffiyeh loose around her neck,
shouting like she’d been born with a microphone in her mouth.
She looked like my Sito,
like the girl I used to be
before exile carved silence where my accent used to live.
She held a sign that said Free Them All.
I held her lunch in a paper bag.
What kind of mother am I?
The kind who packed dates and water
and a phone charger
and still wondered if I’d failed her,
for raising her here,
where they erase us from maps
but not from memory.
VII. What the Cameras Don’t Catch
I boil lentils while watching livestreams.
Across the ocean, students sleep in tents,
chant beside barricades,
hold signs the wind can barely carry.
My child plays on the floor beside me,
humming nonsense, stacking blocks.
And I wonder how to mother a child
while the world un-mothers itself.
The pot bubbles over.
I wipe my eyes with the dish towel.
Tomorrow, we’ll go to the library.
I’ll ask for books that name us.
VIII. Crayons and the Cartographer’s Lie
My daughter is four.
She brings home a worksheet with a map
where Palestine is a blank space.
“Did I miss a spot, Mama?” she asks,
her crayon still warm in her fist.
I press my lips to her curls,
and promise her that we are the map.
That every time she says her name,
a border disappears.
Epilogue: For the Daughters Still to Come
You will not know all their names,
but they loved you before you were born.
They lit the dark with memory.
They wrote your future in the margins of banned books.
They saved you a seat at the protest.
They folded your flag into the cradle.
And when others said,
There is no Palestine,
you will laugh
not because it isn’t tragic,
but because you carry the proof
in your bones,
your books,
your breath.
Go on.
Build what they could not destroy.
Say your name like a spell.
Say ours.
