A House of Poetry

Editor’s Note: Today our issue focuses on Israel’s expansion of its genocidal campaign into Lebanon with Huda Fakhreddine’s beautiful reflection on her family’s home and history: “The house we lost in South Lebanon in the fall of 2024 was not a house so much as the dream of a house."

This is the first part of Issue 004 of The Key. Tomorrow, in honor of Palestine Prisoners’ Day, we will send out the second part of this issue.

The last time I saw our home in the South was July 2025. We visited Lebanon briefly and took a day trip to check on the construction still underway. My parents were in a rush to rebuild it after it was gutted by two Israeli rockets in November 2024. We walked up the staircase through the middle of the hollowed house. All the walls were still down. It was a sunny day. We all stood around. Nowhere to sit. We knew the visit had to be brief. The buzz of drones hovered above us.

My 13-year-old daughter, Samaa, who was born in Vermont and grew up in Philadelphia, thought of the village house as her home too. She was distraught by the destruction. I had hoped this would be as close as she would ever come to war. She wandered into the garden. I saw her turn toward the valley and look out to her father’s Palestine. She has only been there once. She has been stopped at borders and detained at checkpoints. She knows what it is to be Palestinian.

Suddenly, she cried out, “Mom! Help!” We rushed to her. Her face was white, and she held her phone out in her palm as if her hand were burning. The screen read: “Welcome to Israel. You can now enjoy unlimited data.” Our hearts sank. The earth seemed to drop beneath our feet. We stood frozen until Hasan, the young man who cared for the garden in my parents’ absence, said, “Look there.” He pointed to his village across the hill. “Do you see that reception tower? They put it there recently. Now we get their cellphone signal. You must have an American plan. They are taking the land meter by meter while we sleep.” Hasan knew they would eventually come for the land in broad daylight, as they have many times before. The news says his village is now one of those leveled to the ground.

My daughter’s face in that moment will haunt me forever. She thought she was there to witness the rebuilding of her grandfather’s house, not the horror of occupation in real time. The monsters came for her grandfather’s house again. They came through her phone.

The house we lost in South Lebanon in the fall of 2024 was not a house so much as the dream of a house. It was always in the making, growing like a tree. Since my parents first dreamed of it in 1985, it rose and fell in whichever direction the winds of war blew. It sat in the middle of an ancient fig orchard on land the villagers called “the rooftop,” an incline on the shoulder of the hill. Wherever you looked, the sky was within reach, and the hills of Jabal Amil rolled into scattered villages, old oak trees, and olive groves. You could see as far as your sight could travel in all directions. The most beautiful view was to the southeast, toward Mount Hermon, wrapped in his white cloak, as a crisp breeze carried your gaze to Palestine.

And to the east,
far away, beyond the hills and villages,
the land ends at Mount Hermon.
They say: He is the Sheikh. He knows what surrounds him.
He watches like an elder, head turned gray with years.
In winter, he wears his snow crown. In summer, he lightens up
and loosens his turban to feed the springs.
Bareheaded, he emerges from among the hills and villages.
Our balcony turns to Hermon so the morning that breaks above his peak
would enter our house, a dawn, white like his winter turban.
He lingers, in our company, and steadfast, 
vanishes into the endless sky.

…and our South leads to Palestine.
Many balconies flash like lightning across the years:
one for remembrance, one for apprehension,
one for all meanings that migrated then returned,
and keep migrating and returning…
and above all that, the specter of legends,
carried back and forth by the southern winds.

From Jawdat Fakhreddine’s “Geometry,” 2021

My parents, Latifa and Jawdat, met in the mid-1970s, right after the eruption of the civil war in Lebanon. She, a philosophy major, and he, an emerging poet, began careers in education and were appointed to the Lebanese public school system. When they married in 1980, they rented an apartment in a building on a tree-lined street in al-Rouwais, in Beirut’s southern suburb. It was nobody’s stronghold then. No assumptions came to mind when you mentioned the street — no stereotypes, no affiliations. It was an up-and-coming neighborhood, with a few old villas and beautifully kept gardens belonging to well-known families in the area.

The apartment was on the sixth floor, and you could see all the way up to Baʿabda, a town on the shoulder of Mount Lebanon. This was the house I was brought back to when I was born in 1981. I have no memory of that apartment. I was later told that I had a room in it, a nursery.

Soon after I was born, a car bomb exploded in the street below, and many apartments, including ours, burned and became uninhabitable. A few months later, a rocket landed in one of the bedrooms. Luckily, Latifa and Jawdat and their baby were visiting family in the South. They abandoned their brief life there and spent the next decade in borrowed houses: relatives’ apartments, and long stretches at their parents’ houses — hers in ʿAnkoun, above Saida, and his in Soultanieh, further south. My younger brother Ali (born two years after me) and I traveled with them across burning Lebanon for the first decade of our lives.

As the East–West division hardened in the 1980s, my parents moved their teaching appointments to the South. They lived in my grandparents’ house in al-Soultanieh. My mother taught at the village school; my father at a high school in nearby Tibneen. They were able to stay away from Beirut for only a few years. They eventually returned to live in borrowed houses and teach in the city but knew the village would always be the first and last place. They imagined life as a circle and decided to build a house to center it. In 1985, my father asked his father for a piece of land on top of the mountain, and my parents began — very slowly, as two public school salaries allowed — to build that house.

Let us start with a passing cloud
and let its shade be a tent.
The garden’s creatures will seek refuge in it,
and it will stretch wide. No harm if it tears.
Little skies will open in its roof.
The tent is no longer a veil but a space,
a space that we draw,
whose edges we define and fence in
with our bewildered realizations.
…

We make for poetry in our house rooms and windows:
all the windows, all the rooms.
Yet poetry takes over more room than what we make for it.
It teaches us that the meaning of dwelling endures,
becomes sweet and grows immensely,
when dwelling, is in part, a passion. 

From Jawdat Fakhreddine’s “Geometry,” 2021

Growing up in civil-war Lebanon, moving from one borrowed house to another in Beirut, my brother Ali and I were unscathed, or so we thought. The feeling of constant displacement didn’t sink in (at least not until much later), because it was all we knew. We took comfort in the idea that we had a house. It wasn’t there yet, but it was becoming, taking shape as we slept, rising out of the earth, stretching balconies, growing walls, and smiling windows.

We were never bothered by the cramped spaces where we found ourselves — other people’s clothes in the closets, the cupboard we were not allowed to open because it was “not ours.” We didn’t mind that the apartments we spent our childhood were all temporary, because we had a house, all our own, as spacious as our dreams of it. We called it “the rooftop house” — bayt al-sath, our house in the village.

It was early in the morning in November 2024. It must have been very early because my mother was jet-lagged and anxious. She probably hadn’t slept at all, waiting for the right time to make the call. Latifa and Jawdat found themselves, almost against their will, in West Philadelphia. Two years into the genocide in Gaza, Israel was finishing its business in Lebanon, leveling the southern suburb of Beirut and escalating its aggression in the South. By then, my parents had survived the 15 years of the Lebanese Civil War, the countless Israeli invasions and incursions, large-scale operations and small ones, the ups and downs of a country in the throes of history. By the early 2000s, they were living in an apartment in Hamra, near the American University of Beirut, where my younger brother Mohammad and I went to school, and where my father, after retiring from the Lebanese University, taught part time. They managed against the odds — the same odds every Lebanese family faces — they managed to build a life and rebuild it again and again.

In November 2024, my brothers and I convinced them to leave temporarily. They didn’t pack for a long stay. I think they made sure, deliberately, that their time away from Beirut would be uncomfortable — unfeasible in the long term, bound to end quickly. She brought medication for only a week. He rarely sat down, always pacing. And the news… They always wanted the news.

It was early in the morning in Philadelphia, and my mother was waiting to make the call. The night before, we had received news that the house in the South had been hit. By then, the house was finally complete; before the genocide began, Jawdat and Latifa, both retired, had started to imagine living there full time. I scoured relatives’ social media accounts for photos. My father finally sat down. My mother tried to reason with her fear: “It’s been hit before. It’s probably minor. Perhaps the rocket fell in the garden. Maybe it’s just the glass. We knew there would be no glass anyway.” She went on like this. I found nothing — no photos, no news. We decided to wake up early and call the shepherd, Mustafa. He would know.

That November, everyone except Mustafa had left the village. His wife and children had gone too, but he stayed behind with the sheep. He also had a few goats. Mustafa was the village shepherd; his father had been the shepherd before him. In summers and on weekends in the village, I remember spotting him almost every afternoon from our balcony, walking with the herd across the valley. He took his time, sometimes calling out over his shoulder to a stray sheep without turning to look. He knew that once he started walking, they would follow. He walked the land, jumped over stone walls, and left the sheep to figure it out. The goats always knew what to do. Watching him from the balcony, I thought Mustafa seemed timeless, though I knew he was only a few years older than me. I have flashes of playing with him as children, back when my parents lived in the village. My mother would sometimes leave me with his mother. All his older siblings were my mother’s students at the village school. I don’t remember much about us as children, except his golden curls and the musky scent of earth and manure in their backyard.

Mustafa had a cellphone that sometimes got reception, though not when he was out with the sheep. We called once. Nothing. We called again. He picked up.

“Good morning,” I said. “Mr. Mustafa? I am Jawdat Fakhreddine’s daughter. We heard the house was hit. Have you passed by recently?”

He hadn’t, but he promised to check the next time he was out.

“If I don’t pick up,” he said, “it’s either that I have no reception or that I am too nervous to speak.”

Then he hung up.

Two days later, we received four photos: The first showed the front of the house. It seemed intact, except for the glass doors that were blown out. My mother exhaled. Then the second photo from the side — nothing. The third and fourth showed a house hollowed out. Two rockets had fallen through it. Crisscrossed it. The facade remained standing, but everything else had caved in. Only one corner of the upstairs living room was miraculously intact: the library. It stood in the middle of nothing. The floor beneath it was held by some accident of engineering; the ceiling now opened onto the sky.

This was our real library. All the other makeshift ones in Beirut never compared. Everything meant to be safeguarded from time and war had been sent there: papers, photos, books that mattered more than other books, family documents, and other small treasures. Now, in Philadelphia, my parents and I zoomed in and out of photos, played videos forward and scrubbed them backward on our phones, examining the rubble of all we held most dear — the rubble of the place we thought would always be there against Time.When a ceasefire was announced in Lebanon on Nov. 26, 2024, my parents were on a plane back the next day. There was no convincing them to wait, no reminding them what a ceasefire with monsters really meant. They couldn’t stay away. They had a ruin they needed to stand upon, to inspect, to mourn briefly, and then to put back together as soon as possible.

For months after that, as warplanes circled above the villages of the South, our beloved pile of rubble became a construction site. My father couldn’t sleep until at least one ceiling was erected. The two-story house would shrink. It would sit smaller than before, but it would be there against the odds. My parents, who had lost all their savings in Lebanon’s banking collapse, gathered everything they had — all the cash they were allowed to withdraw piecemeal from ATMs, all the money they were making from my father’s part-time teaching at the American University of Beirut, all the cash hidden between the books in the library in the apartment in Beirut came out, from the drawers, from the old briefcases. Everything went into rebuilding what they could. Every weekend, against our pleas from the US and against any better judgment, they drove to the village to check on the work and pay the bills, even as Israeli airstrikes continued to bomb the roads and the villages.

People in our village say a fig tree never dies. Before the mother tree withers completely, at least three or four new shoots spring up at its roots. One of them is bound to take over, growing like her mother, its trunk bending in the same direction, its branches tracing hers in the air. Our house must have learned the way of fig trees. It had been hit many times before during Israeli invasions both large and small, but the damage was always relatively minor: windows, a wall, a fallen balcony, an injured well. But this time, that house was leveled. I worried it would not have time to plan its resurrection. I worried the air where it stood would release its memory before my parents had enough time and resources to help it up again.

And the genocide in Gaza raged on, and in its shadow, the systematic destruction of South Lebanon. Conversations with family scattered across the world — aunts, uncles, and cousins in California, Texas, Canada, and Europe — became rounds of absurd bargaining. Would they hit the same house twice? Would visible construction make it a target? Would writing about it, posting about it, do the same? The paranoia was justified. The Israeli army was left to do all and everything in Gaza for three years now, and in Lebanon, their evil drones travel the length and width of the country and target anyone, anywhere, for reasons explicit or not. And still, by January 2026, our house had walls, a ceiling, windows, and a door. It was rising again. We still believed we would return soon.

I called my aunt as she fled the village. Fatima had lived for over 20 years in the U.S. and eventually returned home and built a beautiful house with a sweeping view and the garden of her dreams. From her balcony, she could see our house — her brother’s house — across the valley. That’s how we imagined our summers: slow months together in a place that knows us as we knew ourselves.

When the Israeli bombs started falling too close on March 2, Fatima reluctantly got into her car with a banana and a bottle of water and started driving north to Beirut. My parents were waiting for her in their apartment in the city. Checking in via texts from Philadelphia, I was relieved she had left. She had expected the car ride to take longer than the typical two hours since many others were also fleeing, but none of us imagined it would take her 22 hours to get to Saida. She gave up 45 minutes south of Beirut, stayed the night with a relative, and finished the journey the next day.

Since she left, no one remains in the village to tell us about the house. We heard that even Mustafa eventually left. I don’t know what happened to his herd. I recently saw a story about an abandoned herd of sheep that made it to Saida. They couldn’t have been his; our village is too far south — but I was glad they had the sense to move in the right direction.

Every day now, as Israel continues its rampage of destruction, its expanding genocide, we watch and wait. South Lebanon has been cut off. Bridges have fallen. Border villages are occupied. “How many kilometers do you think they have taken today?” my brother Ali asked me. “Will we ever get to go back?” I didn’t know what to say.

I think of Gaza. I think of Palestinian keys held close for 78 years. I think of young Palestinians I met in refugee camps in Lebanon who still carry the accents of their grandparents expelled from villages — some occupied, some wiped away entirely. I think of refugees in the West Bank and across historic Palestine, refugees in their own land, living just meters from their homes, yet as far away as can be. Will we ever return?

A history of weeping upon ruins has given us a language. It has taught us to turn beloved places into portals in time. When a poet weeps, a world is invited into being — a world full of those who have departed and places that are no more, but it is a world that forces itself into existence. Once the weeping starts in language, something takes shape and moves forward. Is it a return? A journey in a new direction? A circle or a line? I don’t know.

I return to “The Poem, Itself,” a poem I grew up hearing my father recite at readings, a poem he keeps writing, a poem I keep returning to. It begins like this:

We return to the poem, itself, 
the poem, we are destined to.
We bathe in its fire, we peer
through its lines, one after another,
as though they were built to shelter us
from the blaze of ourselves.
We return to the poem, the poem again,
and we gaze into a void nothing else can fill,
nothing else can ignite.

We release a buried language,
violate the treasuries of piety,
and walk toward secrets we call our desires,
hidden secrets that draws us toward death,
and send us wandering into a prophetic oblivion.
What echo returns?
What shakes the bonds of shackled time?
What flash unsettles our wakefulness for a moment,
so that the nearby earth and the distant earth
tremble around us and ward off our waking dreams?

We find our way and lose ourselves.
This is us, again and again:
an agitation with which we rock the ages,
tear them into rags,
and remain their thread,
an agitation that guides us
as though we are the fatigue of Time itself,
Time that exhausts itself, lies still and burdened,
or startles itself and awakes, sweeping away our years,
its dead children.
This is us, again and again.
We resist. We take refuge in the storm that is to come.
We keep forgetting our anguished stumbling,
blazing on the summits of the ages.
We forget it burning
on the summits of the ages…

From Jawdat Fakhreddine’s “The Poem Itself,” 1984

“Our South leads to Palestine,” and it always will. It has been its doorway, and part of its path, for centuries. The land knows no border. There are Lebanese trees whose living roots are still in Palestine, and rocks in Galilee that remember the hands that carried them from South Lebanon. They remember the hills of Jabal Amil, their mothers. The land knows no border and acknowledges no American plan. We will always have our house in the South — a house and the dream of a house — always in the making, growing like a tree. It has a balcony where Mount Hermon comes to visit, from which you can see as far as your gaze can travel, in all directions. And the most beautiful view of all is when a free crisp breeze carries you to Palestine.

Since Israel resumed its annihilation campaign on South Lebanon on March 2, I’d been wondering what one does with a herd of sheep during a genocide, until my mother forwarded a WhatsApp video. It was tagged “forwarded many times.” An entire village was sharing it, playing it, and replaying it.

The video is shot from the passenger seat of a truck following two others. You can see the mixed herd of goats and sheep packed together, swimming on top of each other as the truck ahead rocks and sways. One little white goat pokes its head out from the side.

The footage follows the caravan of trucks on its exodus from Soultanieh, past Bashir’s shop, where we used to buy all colors of candy in the summer, then past my great-aunt Yusra’s house, its aged pine trees peeking over a stone wall. The trucks then turn toward the baydar — once the village threshing grounds and now a public garden. Then a left up the main road, an incline, past Hajj Ismail’s house, my other great-aunt Umm Salah’s house, Umm Fady’s house, then the mayor’s house.

Somewhere along that road, a dog appears, running behind the truck loaded with sheep, as if pleading to be taken along. The truck keeps moving steadily. The dog follows, gives up, yet intent on bidding the herd farewell, keeps trailing the truck.

Before the caravan turns again toward the road to Beirut, the small mischievous goat that had been peeking from the side slips and falls. Its body hits the pavement and curls in on itself. The man filming says, “That’s a goner.” The driver replies, “The guys behind us will pick it up,” and they keep driving. The video cuts. The goat on the side of the road. The dog behind the caravan in despair.

This is the last scene from Soultanieh: Mustafa and his herd, the last of the villagers. Was the goat picked up? Will the dog find consolation in the fact that he was not left alone after all? He will soon realize he had been abandoned; he will go hungry in a village without people. Whether his friend is dead or alive will not matter much then.