Palestinians often say their history was written twice: once in documents, and once in verse. Long before there were archives, there were poets — and after 1948, when so much of the physical homeland was lost, poetry became one of the places Palestine continued to exist intact. To read Palestinian poetry is to encounter sumud — steadfastness — in its purest literary form: the insistence on memory, dignity, and presence against every pressure to disappear.
This is why our Sumud15 challenge sends participants one Palestinian poem a day for fifteen days. A poem takes minutes to read and stays for years. Below are fifteen poems and poets we return to again and again — a starting map for anyone discovering this extraordinary literature.
Fifteen poems of steadfastness
- “Identity Card” — Mahmoud Darwish (1964). The poem that made Darwish the voice of a generation, built on the defiant refrain “Write down: I am an Arab.” A young man's demand to be seen, counted, and named.
- “Think of Others” — Mahmoud Darwish. A short, piercing meditation on empathy — as you prepare your breakfast, wage your wars, pay your water bill, think of others. Perhaps the gentlest call to conscience ever written.
- “On This Land” — Mahmoud Darwish. “We have on this land that which makes life worth living.” A love poem to the ordinary details — bread, aromas, an hour of sun — that make a homeland.
- “Enough for Me” — Fadwa Tuqan. The grande dame of Palestinian letters asks only to die in her country and be buried in its soil, to dissolve and return as a flower. Sumud as a wish that outlasts death itself.
- “Hamza” — Fadwa Tuqan. A portrait of an ordinary man from her hometown of Nablus who insists, as the ground burns around him: “This land is a woman.” The land endures, and so do its people.
- “Here We Will Stay” — Tawfiq Zayyad. Written by the poet-mayor of Nazareth, this is sumud made anthem: “Here we will stay, like a wall upon your chest.” Recited at gatherings for half a century.
- “I Call to You” (Unadikum) — Tawfiq Zayyad. Set to music and sung across the Arab world — “I clasp your hands” — a poem of solidarity between the scattered pieces of one people.
- “End of a Discussion with a Jailer” — Samih al-Qasim. Four lines, one window, and the unbreakable interior freedom of the prisoner. Al-Qasim distilled resistance into epigram better than anyone.
- “Mawtini” (My Homeland) — Ibrahim Tuqan (1934). Written by Fadwa's brother before the Nakba, this poem became an unofficial anthem of Palestine — proof that the love predates the loss.
- “The Deluge and the Tree” — Fadwa Tuqan. After the 1967 defeat, Tuqan answered despair with an image that still steadies readers: the storm fells branches, but the tree rises again from its roots.
- “Running Orders” — Lena Khalaf Tuffaha. A contemporary Palestinian-American poet captures the impossible arithmetic of a family given 58 seconds' warning to leave their home.
- “We Teach Life, Sir” — Rafeef Ziadah. The spoken-word piece that traveled the world: a poet answering a journalist's cynicism with the fiercest possible affirmation of her people's humanity.
- “If I Must Die” — Refaat Alareer (2011, shared anew in 2023). The Gaza professor's instruction to those who survive him — make a kite, white with a long tail — became one of the most translated poems of our time after his death in December 2023.
- Poems from “Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear” — Mosab Abu Toha. A young Gaza poet writing in English, tender and unflinching, carrying the library of a besieged city inside him.
- “Different Ways to Pray” — Naomi Shihab Nye. The Palestinian-American poet of the diaspora, finding the homeland in a grandmother's gestures — proof that memory travels, and poetry travels with it.
A statistic can be disputed. A poem, once it enters you, keeps its own record.
Why poetry carries Palestinian memory
Palestinian poetry did not become political by choice; history left it no other option. After the Nakba of 1948, poets like Darwish, al-Qasim, and Zayyad — many of them living under military rule — discovered that a poem could cross borders that people could not. Verses were memorized, sung at weddings, whispered in prisons, printed in exile newspapers, and passed from parent to child like the keys to lost houses. The poem became a homeland you could carry in your chest.
That is the same conviction behind our own work. Palistory records the first-hand testimony of Palestinians displaced since 1948 — because like poetry, a person telling their own story preserves what no summary can: the voice itself.
Read a poem a day, with us
If this list moves you, don't let it end here. Our Sumud15 challenge asks fifteen days of you — a 30-minute walk, one gratitude named, and one thing shared with the group each day. And through Continuous Support, our monthly membership, you stay part of every challenge and every story we preserve, year-round. Fifteen poems is a beginning; steadfastness is a practice.
Every story preserved is a small defeat for erasure
Help us keep Palestinian stories alive
Palistory records first-hand testimony from Palestinians displaced since 1948 — before the generation that remembers is gone.