Water to Water: Gaza/Renga

M
Five, six—and righteous,
the child in green in Gaza
stands in her wrecked home,

grubby, indignant. Her hands
point; she explains what was done

bombed, burned. It all smells
like gas! We had to throw our clothes
away! The earrings my

father gave me… No martyr,
resistant. The burnt cradle…

D
breaks over the cold mountains
of North Carolina where a Cherokee
poet huddles in a cottage

by an indigo fire. She sees
the child and says,

This is the new Trail of Tears.
Calls out, Oh outspread Indian nation
Let’s braid our hair

with the pulverized
gravel of Palestine.

Witness, she says, the unpinned
knuckles of this child. Feel
the burlap curtains whip across…

M
the third floor window
in Belleville, dyed blue-purple
like the hyacinth

on the windowsill. Nedjma
does math homework. Strike today;

but school tomorrow.
Coming back from the demo
they sang in the street—

Rêve Générale!—the slogan
makes her smile. Wan winter sun…

D
is grafted on the broken sink
that Maher uses for percussion.
He sings Frank Sinatra

in a deep cigarette voice
as the bombs catapult down

“It’s now or never.”
He pauses, and his niece releases
her breath over the scratchy

phone line between Gaza
and California. Where are the hills

A poetry collaboration in the call-and-response form of Renga by two award-winning poets during the genocide in Gaza.

In 2009, prompted by the Israeli siege of Gaza, poets Marilyn Hacker and Deema Shehabi started a correspondence. It took the form of responding to each other’s poems. They resumed their poetic dialogue by email after Israel launched its genocidal war on Gaza in October 2023.

Their project involved an alternate call and response between them in the tradition of the Japanese renga form, each poet picking up a word, phrase, or image from the poem preceding. The result is a fascinating poetic conversation. The two poetic voices are beautifully meshed together, so that it actually reads as one long poem.

The poetry is very rich in imagery, and these images stay with you, as do feelings the poems generate, for example, of unrest, of being in exile. Television and social media show you the pictures in the streets, this poetry takes you into the homes and minds of people. You can read it very much between the lines, and therefore it seems to speak to people about their own experiences.

Water to Water: Gaza Renga is a dignified celebration of humanity in and among atrocities. Although triggered by events in Gaza, it weaves in other conflicts past and present.

Published in 2025 by
INTERLINK BOOKS
An imprint of Interlink Publishing Group, Inc.
46 Crosby Street, Northampton, MA 01060
www.interlinkbooks.com
Copyright © Marilyn Hacker and Deema K Shehabi, 2025
ISBN 978-1-62371-582-3

Buy the book here

 Marilyn Hacker is an American poet, translator, and critic. She is Professor of English emerita at the City College of New York. Her books of poetry include Presentation Piece, which won the National Book Award, Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons, and Going Back to the River. In 2010, she received the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry.

 Deema K. Shehabi is a Palestinian American poet and editor. She is the author of Thirteen Departures from the Moon and the co-editor (with Beau Beausoleil) of Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here, for which she received NCBR’s recognition award. She is also the winner of the Nazim Hikmet Poetry Prize in 2018 and a recipient of Best of the Net nomination in 2021 as well as several Pushcart Prize nominations. Her poems have been widely published in literary journals and her work has been translated into Arabic, French, and Farsi.