Two Poems by Dalia Taha ,tr. by Sara Elkamel (Winner of the 2025 Online Translation Contest)
Birzeit Village. Photo by Dalia Taha.
Two Poems
Enter City’s Inhabitants
All my poems are attempts to copy, on paper, the poems before me: the inhabitants of my city. By day, I see them and by night, I write about them. In daylight, I observe how eyes compete with the dark circles beneath them for a larger share of each face, just as poem and white space wrestle to squeeze into one page. And at night, I wonder what each eye, shaped like a camera lens, had managed to record. What is it that appears in their dreams that leaves them so distracted, so lost in thought come morning? What circles their minds even as their faces seem like freshly printed paper? I do not know them. I know nothing but their eyes, slanted and sad. And their faces, as vacant as tropical islands; slabs of sand carved by shadows. And their dark circles, which transform, together with the trees, into bestial shapes in the evening. And I know that under the canopy of trees, they drift through the city’s streets like the covers of used books, encircled by hills that appear to be staring back at them. The settlements on their peaks. And they traverse the sentences inscribed on the walls of their city, as though they themselves were sentences—or question marks. And sometimes they become these sentences, and they die standing upright, like trees.
I do not know you, but I know that it does something to a face
to spend a lifetime watching settlements and surveillance cameras
sprawling over the faces of your mountains.
Enter Olive Trees
Evergreen through the descent of snow or dust, and at the tail end of summer. Only on account of night does it change into silver. Only for love. There are 13 million olives in Palestine. Thirteen million love stories stretched across the hills. Thirteen million thorny stories. It is as if every Palestinian in the world can claim an olive, each extending its roots into the earth, and its neck before the settlement. If you ever want to see mankind’s cruelest face for yourself, come to our land. If you want to witness the darkest fraction of night, visit the olive trees, and stare between their arms—it will feel like spying on night in its bedroom. The tree does not fear night’s bleak soul, and night does not fear the barbed branches. Right there, every Palestinian has their share of oil and darkness. Their share of gold and blood. And with the olive harvest, our fingers and arms are scraped, the settlers hunt us upon the hills, and the sinless valleys turn into battlefields—into mills. From one tap, a golden syrup leaks out, and from its twin, blood.
And we return with oil tins, and shrouds.
And when the bitterness burns our throats,
we figure we have tasted the flavor of the homeland.
About The Author
SARA ELKAMEL holds an MA in arts journalism from Columbia University and an MFA in poetry from New York University. A Pushcart Prize winner, she is the author of the poetry chapbook Field of No Justice (African Poetry Book Fund & Akashic Books, 2021). Her translations include Mona Kareem’s chapbook, I Will Not Fold These Maps (Poetry Translation Centre, 2023) and Dalia Taha’s collection of poetry, Enter World (Graywolf Press, 2026).
DALIA TAHA is a Palestinian poet, playwright, and educator based in Ramallah. She has taught at Brown University, Ramallah Drama Academy, Birzeit University and Al-Quds Bard University. She was awarded the 2024 Banipal Visiting Author Fellowship, and the 2025 Norwegian Writers Guild solidarity award. Taha has published three poetry books, a novel, two plays, and a children’s poetry book. Her plays have been staged at the Royal Court Theatre in London and the Flemish Royal Theatre in Brussels, among others. Her forthcoming poetry collection, Enter World, will be published in 2025 by Almutawassit Publishing House, and in Sara Elkamel’s English translation in 2026 by Graywolf Press.
