The living weep at the news, first with relief, then with despair as the bombs keep falling. They promise the newest dead to stay alive long enough to pull their bodies to shelter despite sniper fire. When at last the shelling pauses, the living set out for their flattened homes. They carry the water they will not find along the way on their backs, trudging in broken shoes on roads that no longer remember being roads. When the living reach the places they were driven from, they pause and look around, trying to understand where their breath hid when they fled. There is nothing before them but a vast expanse of dust and rubble. But the living don’t have the luxury to choke on despair. They wade into the tsunami of wreckage, shifting chunks of concrete with gashed, desperate hands. They know the remnants of their loved ones are somewhere beneath the impossible weight of destruction. They know that rats will have eaten the flesh by now, or dogs, or time with its ravening maw. But the living persist. They dig and dig, hunting for traces of the ones they were forced to leave behind—a bit of bone, a curve of child-sized skull—searching for a whisper, an echo.
Lisa Suhair Majaj
December 2025
Lisa Suhair Majaj is the author of Geographies of Light (2008 Del Sol Press Poetry Prize), of poems and essays published across the US, Europe, and the Middle East, and of two children’s books. She is also co-editor of four collections of critical essays, including the forthcoming Companion to Contemporary Arab American Literature (Routledge). Her poems have been translated into ten languages, and were displayed in the 2016 exhibition Aftermath: The Fallout of War—America and the Middle East (Harn Museum of Art). Her new poetry volume Why Doesn’t the Sky Love Us? is forthcoming. She lives in Cyprus.
Featured Image: Perseverance. A painting by Lisa Suhair Majaj
