Not Just Passing by Hiba Abu Nada

Not Just Passing
by Hiba Abu Nada
Translated by Huda Fakhreddine

 Yesterday, a star said
 to the little light in my heart,
We are not just transients
passing. 

Do not die. Beneath this glow
some wanderers go on
walking.

 You were first created out of love,
so carry nothing but love
to those who are trembling.

 One day, all gardens sprouted
from our names, from what remained
of hearts yearning.

 And since it came of age, this ancient language
has taught us how to heal others
with our longing,

 how to be a heavenly scent
to relax their tightening lungs: a welcome sigh,
a gasp of oxygen.

 Softly, we pass over wounds,
like purposeful gauze, a hint of relief,
an aspirin.

 O little light in me, don’t die,
even if all the galaxies of the world
close in.

 O little light in me, say:
Enter my heart in peace.
 All of you, come in!

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This poem was mentioned to me by Naomi Shihab Nye, who reads it aloud in community settings. It is a movingly healing poem, a wide invitation to everyone, heartbreakingly written…For fuller context, Hiba Abu Nada was a Palestinian poet, novelist, and educator from Gaza. She was thirty-two years old when she was killed in an Israeli airstrike on her home in Khan Younis on October 20, 2023, less than two weeks into the siege that began after October 7. She wrote Not Just Passing in early October 2023, ten days before her death. Huda Fakhreddine, a scholar of Arabic literature at the University of Pennsylvania and one of the most important contemporary translators of Arabic poetry into English, rendered the poem into the version that now circulates widely in vigils, journals, and anthologies. The Arabic title, لسنا عابرين, is the poem’s refrain, we are not just transients passing.