Evacuate

Evacuate

Haneen Alisawi

Originally published in Mondoweiss 20 April 2025

An image falls from the sky

“Evacuate”

They tell me to evacuate my home, my land.

As if my home has legs;

As if the olive tree, that for decades rooted deep,

Will up and follow;

As if the echoes of my mother’s lullabies

Will pack their bags and draft with us to the exile.

“Evacuate,” they order,

While the sky vomits fire,

And the streets run red.

Walk! Where?

To the shore’s cold embrace?

To another home’s rubble?

To a next target that soon will be bombed, be vanished?

Israel devours the land like a hungry beast.

Before smashing one’s land,

Orders to gobble the next home and its pals with eyes for the third.

“Evacuate.”

“Evacuate.”

“Evacuate.”

“Eva…”

Orders rain down.

A torrent of displacing orders,

A torrent of blood,

A torrent of body parts,

and a torrent of rubble:

The beast is never full.

Yet—Evacuate.

Evacuate to where?

No place is safeــــonly dangerous and less dangerous.

When we with aching hearts and weary bodies

are displaced to the less dangerous,

My little brother keeps questioning.

“Mama, when will we be home?”

The question never leaves the back of my mind too

Nor the rest of my family, I’m sure.

And my shattered, grieving mother

Nods her head,

Clutching her chest, chokes out,

‘Later,

When it’s safe.

When it’s safe.’

“Safe”

I cling to the word.

What does safe even mean!

I yearn to breathe it into existence.

Isn’t it a mockery of what we’ve lost for years?

SOMETIMES, we evacuate, yes,

With the last shadow of our souls

Dragging our memories,

Our martyrs,

Our stolen futures with us.

And when the bloodthirsty ceases,

When the earth finally slightly opens its jaws,

And the sky turns orange

And ceases swallowing us whole,

They’ll say,

“At least they’re now ‘safe.’

They evacuated for their safety. Good for them!”

As if we had a choice,

As if our feet weren’t bound

By the chains of their barbarities,

By the weight of their bombs.

As if our houses, our trees, our belongings,

Could ever truly walk away so that they, too, are “safe.”

I’m not safe.

I wasn’t safe.

I don’t want to be safe.

I don’t want to leave my home.

I want to be home.

With my grief set in silence.

To mourn my martyrs.

To keep my fears hidden when the bombs fall,

Patting my back as they always do.

Let me be homeــــ

I’m a Gazan, my mate: Israel will kill me anyway.

So, let my home embrace me one last time.

Haneen Alisawi is a freelance writer based in Gaza.