The Story Cafe | Stories for Wellbeing

06/08/2025

24/07/2025

My Orcadian column for July

20/07/2025

“Poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.”

- The Selected Words of Audre Lorde

25/06/2025

22/06/2025

Taqwa Al-wawi, new powerful and moving poem.

19/06/2025

The war will end.
The leaders will shake hands.
The old woman will
keep waiting for her martyred son.

That girl will wait for
her beloved husband.
And those children will wait
for their heroic father.

I don't know
who sold our homeland.
But I saw who paid the price.

~Mahmoud Darwish

18/06/2025

“To the Soldier Who Points a Gun at Me”

You think I’m here to die.
You think that’s all we know how to do—
bleed, bury, break.

But listen.

I grow things.
Tomatoes in rusted cans.
Hope in children who don’t know what the word means yet.
I build—walls, stories, mornings.
I fix roofs with one hand and hold my daughter’s hand with the other.

And you?
You carry a gun like it’s your purpose.
But I’ve seen men become ghosts
long before the trigger is pulled.

You call this land a threat.
I call it history .
The call to prayer. The school bell.
The pot of lentils boiling over.

Don’t mistake my softness for surrender.
I don’t need to shout to be strong.
The fig tree in my yard
has stood through three wars
without raising its voice.

You—
with your steel and fear,
your borrowed power—
you patrol streets looking for danger
and miss the beauty flowering between the cracks.

You fear death.
I fear forgetting how to live.

So if you shoot,
know this:
I wasn’t born to hate.
But I won’t vanish to make you comfortable.
I won’t flinch so you can sleep easier.

I am not your victim.
I am not your enemy.
I am the reminder
that even under occupation,
a man can love too fiercely to be erased.

- Sameh Shahrouj

H/T Cadfa (Camden Abu Dis Friendship Association)

28/03/2025

Thanks to Mitch Ditkoff for this amazing quote.

07/02/2025

buymeacoffee.com/gazapoets

14/12/2024

Listen now | Hello,