Our Monthly Poetry Collection is published on the first Tuesday of each month and curated by Palestinian-American poet Zeina Azzam. For the month of October, we feature “Migrant Earth” by Deema Shehabi. 

Deema Shehabi is a Palestinian poet, writer, and editor. Her mother and father hail from Gaza and Jerusalem, respectively. She was born in Kuwait, came to the Boston area for college and continues to live in the United States. Shehabi’s poems appear in many important literary journals and reviews. Her first book of poetry, Thirteen Departures from the Moon, was published in 2011, and a second book titled Diaspo/Renga, featured a collaboration with poet Marilyn Hacker and was published in 2014. She also worked with another poet, Beau Beausoleil, to collect and edit an anthology containing diverse writings that respond to the 2007 bombing of Baghdad’s al-Mutanabbi Street. Some of the themes Shehabi explores in her work are Palestine, war, exile, the feeling of being trapped between two different worlds, identity, loss and displacement. When she was asked in an interview about the concept of “home,” she answered: “Home is all the places and landscapes and people I’ve grown to love. It is in the orchards of Gaza, the sunset mountains of France, and the gently rolling hills of this valley in California where I now reside. Home is where I bury my dead, and where I raise my children.” 

Shehabi’s poem, “Migrant Earth,” is preceded by an epigraph that quotes a question from the Mahmoud Darwish poem, “Two Stranger Birds in Our feathers.” He asks in his poem, “So tell me what you think of when the sky is ashen?” Shehabi’s poem is a kind of response to Darwish’s question, as his poem is about exile and hers is about loss—of her mother and of the home from which her family was displaced (“my mother was from Gaza, but what do I know of the migrant / earth…”). This lyrical poem conjures a gray, ashen sky of mourning. It considers, in beautiful words and imagery, the very personal and sad experience of losing her mother. There is a meshing of home and mother in the dream that she mentions in the poem, pointing to a deep search for wholeness. The poet’s soul “journeys and wrinkles / with homeland.” 

Click here to read the poem! 

About Zeina Azzam 

Zeina Azzam is a Palestinian American poet, writer, editor, and community activist. Her poems are published widely in literary journals, anthologies, and edited volumes. Zeina’s chapbook, Bayna Bayna, In-Between, was released by The Poetry Box on May 18, 2021. She holds an M.A. in Arabic literature from Georgetown University.