This week, we feature two poems from the Palestinian writer Ameer Hamad, including “Prayer” which was written during the most recent bombardment of Gaza, an austere appeal for an end to the violence that has seen the Palestinians, killed by Israeli airstrikes, form the overwhelming majority of the death toll. These two poems translated by Katharine Halls are small enough to carry in one’s palm; they utilise a mode of poetic witness attuned to distillation, frankness, and the startling force of an ending. Even as the recent ceasefire has struck a note of fragile peace, we read Ameer Hamad’s unflinching poems as a reminder that a people’s freedom can only come at the end of dispossession.
Prayer
Lord with your cloth wipe the smoke from our mirrors
Extinguish the fire at our windows with your tears
We have no strength not to trust in your mercy
Rockets have broken the bones of our planets
Bombs have shattered the glass of our air
And the fragments lie heavy on our eyes
As we hold them out to you
That you may set them on the scales.
The Mediterranean Sea
I was a timid child, his father drowning in front of him
He shouted to me, from a whirlpool tugging his soul
out of the collar of its shirt, to get help
I shook at this proximity: my own name, and drowning
His voice each time came back as bats crashing into his body
I was frozen to the spot, my tongue distracted by the salt on my lips
My father was paddling far away with fins gone stiff in the foam
And I was departing, further, in the nets of fisherpeople
who dreamt of returning home
with golden fish that tell stories
Then my father came back from the sea without my help
And when he passed me he avoided my eyes
To save me from seeing in his blue face
the octopus of his disappointment.
Translated from the Arabic by Katharine Halls
Ameer Hamad was born in Jerusalem in 1992. He holds a degree in computer science from Birzeit University. In 2019, he was awarded the Al-Qattan prize in two categories for his first two books: Gigi and Ali’s Rabbit, a collection of short stories, and I Searched for Their Keys in the Locks, a collection of poetry (both forthcoming this year from Al Ahlia). His work can be read in English in The Book of Ramallah (Comma Press, 2021) and ArabLit.
Katharine Halls is an Arabic-to-English translator from Cardiff, Wales. She was awarded a 2021 PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant to translate Haytham El-Wardany’s short story collection Things That Can’t Be Fixed. Her translation, with Adam Talib, of Raja Alem’s novel The Dove’s Necklace received the 2017 Sheikh Hamad Award and was shortlisted for the Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize. Her translations for the stage have been performed at the Royal Court and the Edinburgh Festival.
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