Two Poems by Dalia Taha

Dalia Taha writes on Palestine and the messages etched into the land, in two poems from LARB Quarterly no. 47, ‘Security,’ translated by Sara Elkamel.

By Dalia Taha, Sara ElkamelDecember 30, 2025

• Poetry

• LARB Lit

These poems are a preview of the LARB Quarterly, no. 47: Security. Become a member for more fiction, essays, criticism, poetry, and art from this issue—plus the next four issues of the Quarterly in print.

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Enter Words on the Walls

When I returned to Palestine, I saw soldiers everywhere I went. They patrolled roadblocks between the house and the school. And between Birzeit and Ramallah. And between Ramallah and the sea. Then I discovered that something else had spread as vigorously as our land’s zinzalakht trees: writing on the walls. When soldiers choked our passage, we could spot the words going where we could not go, like threads of smoke. The walls were being furnished with new words every day—like trees perpetually birthing new leaves from their veins. We wandered between sentences like sentences. We were readers first, and citizens second. Sometimes, we became words, and died standing upright, like trees. And there were the smuggled manifestos that people burned or buried once they read them, and prisoners’ letters in miniature handwriting, rolled into capsules that had passed through countless hands to reach us. Printing presses lived in buildings the way children did: under our watchful eyes. Pamphlets were printed in the night, while the trees swayed their branches through the sky. And when soldiers entered our homes and waved their weapons in our faces, we realized that to read is to find our way to the pages that were never meant to reach us. We were the readers of the world’s forbidden books. And outside, the trees were swaying their branches through the sky. When night fell, the stars would puncture the sky. Before words could drill holes into them, we had been oblivious to how closely walls resemble margins. In them we wrote what could only be written in squiggly lines: FREEDOM.

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Enter Hills

You can’t see it
but I stared too long at the hills
my eyes have bruised.
It’s on the inside,
beneath the skin, in the spot
closest to what they call the soul.
The hills are otherworldly and distant,
particularly those between Jericho and Amman—
from the taxi, they appear as a procession
of souls, or like snipers
contemplating the desert road.
Everything is in its place,
like a mathematical equation:
the living on one side,
and the dead on the other.
But from somewhere on those hills,
I imagine the dead
waving to us, trying
to climb down to the highway,
where the cars glimmer
before they vanish into the wind.
In the right lane, one truck
after another hauls stones
under a setting sun, where the wind
is the one true driver,
dragging us behind it, our necks
bent backward.
I can understand now that everything began here,
on this arid, lightless land.
Everything that came next was coincidence:
trees, rivers, insects, the shapes
of clouds and weeds,
and suspended bridges.
And it is here too
that everything will end,leaving no trace of this world
but the mystery of how it began.
I’m obsessed with the hills.
I can’t stop staring at them—
like I’m trying to remember where we met before,
like their name
is on the tip of my tongue. I try to pull it out
from a cavernous gorge within me.
From my childhood,
I’ve believed that if I stared
at anything long enough,
it would start to move.
This, of course, has never happened.
But the hills do in fact look
like they’re about to start walking towards me.
Just look at the droplets of light
shimmering above them:
like a hundred eyes opening at the same instant.
My bags are in the trunk,
and here,
in the hot air of the Jordan Valley,
I feel as though what my hands folded
just moments ago
were not my clothes
but crumpled souls,
and that what my eyes now watch
passing outside the window
are not the hills,
but the ruins of the roads we crossed
before we arrived in this world—
naked, bathed in bruises and blood,
and finally able
to scream.

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Featured image: Marsden Hartley, Landscape no. 26, 1909–10. Alfred Stieglitz Collection, Art Institute Chicago (1949.543). CC0, artic.edu. Accessed December 24, 2025. Image has been cropped.