Introduction by Wiam El-Tamami

I first met Nasser Rabah in 2024, and he has since become a beloved friend, honorary uncle, and close collaborator. I say “met,” though of course we have yet to meet in person: Nasser was born in Gaza in 1963 and continues to live there, in his homeland that has been turned, by the forces of occupation, into a prison.

He has published six collections of poetry and two novels and is currently at work on his third.

Over the course of our nearly two years of friendship, Nasser has astonished me with his kindness, his formidable spirit, his brilliant, irrepressible sense of humor — and with the depth of his faith through the horrors of the ongoing genocide.

And then there is his poetry.

Nasser has written prolifically over the past two and a half years. Every time it feels as though there is no language left to describe the devastation inflicted on the people of Gaza and its people, he finds new ways to articulate the collective experience.

His work maps an emotional chronology of this catastrophe. Some poems roil with rage; others heave with defeat. There are poems of listlessness, of waiting, of desolation; ars poeticas that reflect on what it means to be a writer at this moment; and sweeping anthems that reverberate with power, defiance, and grace. Through it all, Nasser’s poetry pulses with life, with startling images, with small details observed with patient tenderness — with faithful, loving attention to the world around him, even as it is being brutally and systematically destroyed.

Translated by Wiam El-Tamami

Open up this huge cage —
Open it, just a crack —
Let the children escape this trap
that life has laid —

Let them savor, for the first time,
the smell of electricity;
touch, with thin fingers,
the cinema’s shivering thrill;
ask with worried voices
what time the train will come in.

Let them meet themselves
outside these waking dreams —
step, for once in their lives, onto
a crosswalk; test their feet out
on the asphalt.

Open up this huge cage —
So that birds will understand the value of wings,
will know there are other languages to sing,
and endings more beautiful
than the ambulance.
That wayfaring is more blue
than the sea, and ports,
like love, are glittering green.

Leave this place.
Let your parents guard your absence.
Leave the roots in the darkness of the soil
so the flowers can reach up towards the sun.
Climb onto our shoulders, clamber out of the rubble
so you can see what we have never seen
and know what we have never known:
That cages are a crime,
and we are innocent.

Open up this huge cage!
Open it — blow it up —
Let the young ones out of here
To knead their dreams with the waters of astonishment;
To send their desires through the mail of experience;
To grow up away
from time’s torn limbs.

Let them scatter temptation, like candy,
in their loved ones’ palms:
tell us how they’ve dragged the ship
to the mountaintop by its horns!
We’ll let them lie, to sweeten this evening a little;
we’ll believe them, and ask about April’s fools.
They’ll be back, in any case, in a year of two —
they won’t be late, we’re sure —
nobody would miss their parents’ funeral.

 Nasser Rabah’s first poetry collection in English, Gaza: The Poem Said Its Piece (translated by Ammiel Alcalay, Emna Zghal, and Khaled Al-Hilli), was published by City Lights in April 2025.