Mohammad Rahim Saleh, youngest published Palestinian poet, silenced forever

By Humaira Ahad

“My poems unravel into prose

if written for anyone else. All the praise I say,

if not of her, turns to lament.”

There are excerpts from the poem "She Tripped in Beauty” by Mohammad Abdul Rahim Saleh, a young and promising Palestinian poet whose life was brutally cut short by the genocidal regime.

Twenty-one-year-old Saleh had the distinction of being the youngest poet to have a poetic collection published in Palestine.

His remarkable success made him conceive a bright future for himself as his book, “His Hand Fell” was widely acclaimed in the literary circles in the Arab world.

Last year, in February, Saleh’s friends at the Islamic University of Gaza and the Palestinian Youth and Culture Club gathered to celebrate the publication of his debut poetry collection.

Wishing him further success, his teachers and friends were certain about more and bigger literary feats from him, believing in his outstanding potential and hunger to make a mark for himself.

However, the young man’s life didn’t turn out the way it was visualized.

On October 10 last year, days after the Israeli regime launched its genocidal war against Palestinians in Gaza, Saleh was killed by an Israeli airstrike.

Saleh was born and raised in the Jabalia refugee camp in northern Gaza. Apart from his interest in literature, the young Palestinian was also fascinated by the camera, walking through the streets of Gaza to capture moments and later turn them into videos.

“He had asked me a few months ago to write an introduction to his first poetry collection, so I wrote it with love and dignity … Our beautiful (Saleh)excelled in poetry, just as he excelled in the poetry of resistance, and I believe that the collection was built on these two wings,” said Dr. Ayman Al-Atoum, a Jordanian poet and novelist who wrote the introduction to Saleh’s debut book “His Hand Fell”.

Humans of Gaza: Refaat Al Araeer, a poet, professor and activist

Celebrated Palestinian poet, writer, professor, and activist Refaat Al Araeer was killed on December 7 when an Israeli airstrike pounded his sister’s home in southern Gaza.

Huda J. Fakhreddine, an associate professor of Arabic Literature at the University of Pennsylvania, paid her tribute to the young Palestinian poet in these words:

“I am haunted by the video in which he sits on a rooftop against the sunset, his beautiful smile and the pride he takes in every turn of phrase, in his mastery of meter, in the rounding of rhyme at the end of each verse. He speaks of love, stolen peeks, fires of desire, and dreams of kisses…This is the poetry of a young poet who should have lived.”

Fakhreddine said she wanted to imagine Mohammad in his thirties, his fifties, his seventies, having written many more poetry collections.

“I want to imagine him with the time and the luxury to experiment, to argue with other poets, to learn from them, to rebel against them,” she wrote.

“I want to imagine him, having read and written much more, looking back at this poem and that video, smiling his beautiful smile, and remembering all that love and all that revolution, at that moment, when he was young, and Palestine became free.”

Almost 9,000 students have been killed and more than 15,000 others wounded in the ongoing Israeli genocidal war on the Gaza Strip, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Education and Higher Education.

In May this year, Gaza authorities released a list of more than 100 academics and researchers who were killed by the Israeli forces since October 7.

The report also referred to the killing of a total of 497 teachers with 3,426 others injured in the besieged coastal strip.

As per Palestinian official data, all 12 universities in Gaza have been bombed and wholly or partially destroyed. According to the United Nations, 80 percent of schools have been destroyed or damaged in the territory in the last nine months.

Numerous libraries, archives, publishing houses, cultural centers, activity halls, museums, bookstores, monuments and archival materials have been razed to the ground by the regime forces.

“With more than 80 percent of schools in Gaza damaged or destroyed, it may be reasonable to ask if there is an intentional effort to comprehensively destroy the Palestinian education system, an action known as ‘scholasticide,” UN human rights experts said in a recent report.

Scholasticide is defined as the “systematic obliteration of education through the arrest, detention or killing of teachers, students and staff, and the destruction of educational infrastructure.”

Humans of Gaza: Osama Abu Safia, MBBS student at Gaza’s Al-Azhar University

Gaza resident Osama Abu Safia’s LinkedIn profile mentions 2025 as the year of the completion of his medical education but he didn’t live to see that day as the Israeli airstrike brutally cut short his life.

She tripped in beauty by Mohammad Saleh

She tripped in beauty
and a shining splendor burned me.
And hers is a beauty that does what it may.

Averting my gaze did not quell my desire,
and her eyes gave me nothing to calm my worry,
no comfort, no cure.

On my life, I see no moon but her,
and when she passes no sun
dares shine.

I am ill with love, stricken
with beauty, and there’s no cure
but her soft cheek.

She fell in beauty and a fire
in me raged. She did me in with a desire
no water can put it out.

My poems unravel into prose
if written for anyone else. All the praise I say,
if not of her, turns to lament.

How could a mere garment hide such beauty?
She tripped, and struck by the arrow of hope,
I fell too.

She tripped and fell. Her veil covered her.
What would have happened to me?
had her veil fallen too?

(Translated from Arabic)

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