A Blade of Grass: New Palestinian Poetry

March 7th, 2024, will mark five months of a brutal war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza and other occupied Palestinian territories. As I cope with countless images, narratives, and news of this war, I mostly think of the human cost of the seventy-five year Israeli occupation of Palestine. Who do I trust most with the documentation of these years? Who do I turn to in order to better understand the history? As with most of my personal learning, I turn to poets and artists to give me the most accurately human description of what it must be like to live under these conditions.

A Blade of Grass: New Palestinian Poetry is an anthology I turn to and visit with often. Published in 2017, the volume does not include work that touches on current events. However, it gives space to the work of Palestinian poets from a range of generations who all share in what it means to live under occupation. Included among these poets are Fady Joudah, Mahmoud Darwish, and Sara Saleh, who all help us learn how to find hope and see beauty in the rubble of our cities, how to persevere with love and anger, and how to explain the unexplainable pain of losing home and those you hold dearest.

Presented in both Arabic and English, and in various poetic forms, A Blade of Grass is a poetic, confronting history lesson I so desperately needed. While libraries, schools, and archives are razed throughout Gaza, I think it is more important than ever to witness this history through the work of those who live it.