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The Shadow: Poems for the Children of Gaza
By Ahmed Miqdad & John P. Portelli
Published by Horizons, 2024
It’s tempting to switch channel when confronted with streams of death and destruction, but at what point does avoidance turn into complicity? The Shadow: Poems for the Children of Gaza is an invitation to resist the urge to look away.
The friendship between Ahmed Miqdad, a displaced Palestinian poet in Gaza, and John P. Portelli, a Maltese-Canadian poet and professor emeritus at the University of Toronto, emerged on social media. An exchange of poems reflecting on the humanitarian catastrophe became the poets’ outlet for shared grief, anger and frustration. Despite the unrelenting bombardment of Gaza and Miqdad’s limited access to internet, their poetic dialogue has persisted throughout the past year and culminated in this transparent collection.
Scavenging street dogs, winds carrying a scent of decaying bodies and seagulls fleeing the sound of bombs: this is the unfiltered reality The Shadow immerses its readers in. With visceral imagery and emotional resonance, the read feels hauntingly confrontative. For a moment, we sit on the cold soil in the tent next to Miqdad and his family. We are entering the depths of a collective wound, felt through the parents who are unable to protect their toddlers. This is a running theme across many of the verses, here captured by Miqdad: “I keep your blanket ready in hopes that you’ll find your bed once more, even though I know, the dead will never come back”.
Children are at the heart of the dialogue, and Portelli urges us to see the world through their eyes: “I was the six-year-old girl from Rafah, exhausted from saluting the dead for the last time, shrouded in the bloodstained drapes of a life I always hoped would change one day, if only I were allowed to live”. All proceeds of the book are being donated to Gaza, where the child death toll has reached incomprehensible levels.
Through evocative portraits and unflinching honesty, readers are forced to reflect on the dangers of indifference. With each verse, remnants of detachment are crumbling away and replaced with an unyielding sense of shared responsibility. In the piercing lyrics of I am a Gazan Girl, Portelli touches upon a double-edged phenomenon: “You do not know me, but at times you send me some euros, a cathartic exercise to clear the conscience you inherited from the powerful, their sin of daily bombings”.
For a digital audience oversensitized with constant flows of imagery and clickbaits, this collection is a testament to the profound capacity of words to reignite our sense of empathy and engagement. “Get angry, when you see terrified, hopeless Palestinian parents, innocent children being shredded, with your tax money. Get angry, when you hear the voices of the voiceless burning, buried under the rubble. […] Get angry, if you are human”, Miqdad echoes.
It’s more than a selection of personal reflections – it’s an outcry for the experiences of Palestinians, a letter to humankind. As Gaza has become a landscape of ruins where Israeli warfare has led to unprecedented numbers of civilian casualties, readers are reminded that the “hopeless faces” aren’t one; they are millions.
Despite the book’s heavy tone, there’s a fierce spirit of resilience that surfaces as we journey through the pages. Drawing upon symbolism of kites rising above the smoke and a phoenix reborn from ashes, the poems also convey a message of liberation, renewal and hope. The publication is an embodiment of quiet defiance and a refusal of erasure. As Miqdad puts it: “We are not numbers, we are the difficult number no one can divide or subtract, we are Palestine”.
Sarah Warderberg
Sarah Warderberg is a lawyer based in Malta, Master of Laws (LL.M.), Örebro University and Master of Intellectual History (M.A.), University of Gothenburg.
