I Have Returned, Gentlemen, After a Brief Death

A poetry collection that begins at the threshold of its own title: a return from a death left unfinished, and an exile that resides in the poem more than it does on any map. Here a voice speaks, come back from a brief absence, carrying the dust of the road in its throat, addressing gentlemen we cannot be sure are the keepers of the gates or the witnesses of departure.

The poems in this book keep to a fine edge between loss and survival — a limpid language, yet heavy with memory, that turns the Palestinian experience from a slogan into a whisper, from a cry into a meditation on what it means to return to a place that is no longer as one left it.

I returned, and there was no one in the house but absence.

The book is written in Arabic; this page presents it for English readers.