“The Scent of Time” - by Farah from Gaza

“The Scent of Time”

The minaret was a finger of bone,
Pointing to a sky that remembered his name.
Hashim, the Great Grandfather, etched in the stone,
Before the world was a theater of flame.
​Gaza is not a city of years,
But a map of shadows, a spiral of light,
Where a child in the alleyway suddenly hears
The sandals of traders in the middle of the night.
​To enter the courtyard was to step through a seam,
Where the Mamluk arch hosted us as one.
And the present dissolved like a half-remembered dream,
Into a silk-road story that had only begun.
​They have broken the limestone, the amber, the gate,
They have turned the calligraphy back into dust,
But how do you bury a city’s own fate?
How do you shatter a ghost you can trust?
​The stones may be silent, their geometry torn,
But the air in Al-Daraj still tastes of the past;
For every time Gaza is leveled and shorn,
The roots of the Great Grandfather hold the soil fast.
​You cannot kill a portal with fire or lead,
Nor silence the prayer that the centuries kept.
In the heart of the ruins, the past is not dead—
It is only a giant that hasn't yet slept.
​Gaza is a clock that refuses to break; even in pieces, its hands point toward eternity.