You can’t see it
but I stared too long at the hills
my eyes have bruised.
It’s on the inside,
beneath the skin, in the spot
closest to what they call the soul.
The hills are otherworldly and distant,
particularly those between Jericho and Amman—
from the taxi, they appear as a procession
of souls, or like snipers
contemplating the desert road.
Everything is in its place,
like a mathematical equation:
the living on one side,
and the dead on the other.
But from somewhere on those hills,
I imagine the dead
waving to us, trying
to climb down to the highway,
where the cars glimmer
before they vanish into the wind.
In the right lane, one truck
after another hauls stones
under a setting sun, where the wind
is the one true driver,
dragging us behind it, our necks
bent backward.
I can understand now that everything began here,
on this arid, lightless land.
Everything that came next was coincidence:
trees, rivers, insects, the shapes
of clouds and weeds,
and suspended bridges.
And it is here too
that everything will end, leaving no trace of this world
but the mystery of how it began.
I’m obsessed with the hills.
I can’t stop staring at them—
like I’m trying to remember where we met before,
like their name
is on the tip of my tongue. I try to pull it out
from a cavernous gorge within me.
From my childhood,
I’ve believed that if I stared
at anything long enough,
it would start to move.
This, of course, has never happened.
But the hills do in fact look
like they’re about to start walking towards me.
Just look at the droplets of light
shimmering above them:
like a hundred eyes opening at the same instant.
My bags are in the trunk,
and here,
in the hot air of the Jordan Valley,
I feel as though what my hands folded
just moments ago
were not my clothes
but crumpled souls,
and that what my eyes now watch
passing outside the window
are not the hills,
but the ruins of the roads we crossed
before we arrived in this world—
naked, bathed in bruises and blood,
and finally able
to scream.

Dalia Taha is a Palestinian poet, playwright, and educator. She has published three Arabic poetry books, including "The Biography of the People of the City of R" (2021), "Enter World" (2025). The English translation of her poetry collection "Enter World" (translated by Sara Elkamel) is forthcoming from Graywolf Press in 2026. She lives in Ramallah, Palestine.

Image: Birzeit Village, photo by Dalia Taha