3 Poems by Heba Abu Nada

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From a forthcoming collection for World Poetry Books, tentatively titled “All the Others Have Won Their Wars: Poems by Heba Abu Nada.” These poems were selected and translated by Huda Fakhreddine.

Introduction by Somaia Abu Nada, Heba’s younger sister.

One of the songs Heba grew up listening to, singing along with, and carrying in her heart was the opening theme for a cartoon series called Romeo’s Blue Skies. The show tells the story of young boys whose childhoods are spent working as chimney sweeps to support their families. At the end of each long, exhausting day, after cleaning the soot accumulated inside the narrow, dark chimneys, Romeo finally climbs onto a rooftop. There, above the darkness he has spent his day breathing in, he sits beneath the vast blue sky, filling his lungs with fresh air and looking out at a world that suddenly seems wider than his suffering.

It is a deeply moving story of friendship, loyalty, sacrifice, courage, and, above all, HOPE. One of the lines from the opening theme is “And life gifts us glimmers of light at the end of the tunnel.”

I think Heba held on to that line throughout her life. She, too, was always searching for those glimmers of light, trying to find them through the heaviness of what life had placed upon us as Gazans. Perhaps, like Romeo, she believed that beyond every dark chimney, there must be a blue sky waiting to be seen, a breath of fresh air waiting to be taken.

In her poem “I Try,” Heba reflects on the questions that had begun to take shape in her mind: the mysteries of the universe, the meaning of her existence within it, who she was, and how her soul might continue to glow beyond the boundaries of this life. There is something both tender and immense in the way she contemplates her place in the world, as though she were searching not only for answers, but for a way to leave a little of her light behind.

I return to her words again and again:

“For those who come after
I will leave a heart, white
as a page, so they could write
their names, be free, and leave
behind a melody,
off-key.”

Heba was the truth itself. There was something so pure, so luminous about the way she existed in this world. I like to imagine that every second she spent on this earth has traveled all the way to the Milky Way, leaving behind a pearl among the stars. And whenever we read her words, that pearl glows again, offering us a little of the warmth for which we so desperately yearn. 

Sometimes I wonder whether Heba knew all along that her next home would be in the sky – whether some part of her soul had always belonged to the stars, and whether, through her poetry, she was quietly teaching us where to find her when she was no longer here.

She wrote:

“The ghost of a star
that has died within me
will continue to glow
on the horizon until
darkness catches
the illness of light.”

And perhaps this is what Heba has become: a star whose light continues to travel long after its earthly life has ended. A light that darkness cannot extinguish, a presence that death cannot silence.

Heba lives in the sky now. That is where I look for her whenever I miss her, whenever I have something to tell her, whenever I wish I could hear her voice once more. I lift my eyes toward the stars, searching for that little pearl she left behind, and imagine that somewhere in the vastness of the universe, she is still glowing.

Nothing to see! Just another death,
and blood still trickling its countless stories.
Another report of massacre,
Al Jazeera rounds up.

She fell, slain.
The cameraman said: “Do it again.
Your final gasp.”

“Believe me,” she said, “Nothing you do
in the editing room will shorten
the immensity of this ending.

December 12, 2016

to see a light
at the end of the tunnel
and hope in the middle
of these crowds to stay me.
The ghost of a star

that has died within me
will continue to glow
on the horizon until
darkness catches
the illness of light.

For those who come after
I will leave a heart, white
as a page, so they could write
their names, be free, and leave

behind a melody,
off-key.

Others will never understand
how we send our martyrs to their graves
in coffins of shimmer and blue,
how we sum up all of love and lovers
when we say to the olive tree:
How beautiful death is!
How beautiful it is
to die for you.

Heba Abu Nada (d. 20 October, 2023)