Today I’ll send you to “Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear,” by Palestinian poet Mosab Abu Toha. His recent collection (of the same title) recently won an American Book Award, a ceremony the poet had to skip in order to be able to make it home to his family. Here’s the first stanza, spoken to a doctor (literally) and the poem’s readers (metaphorically):
When you open my ear, touch it
gently.
My mother’s voice lingers somewhere inside.
Her voice is the echo that helps recover my equilibrium
when I feel dizzy during my attentiveness.
Toha’s poem asks me: What do I tune out in order to live? Who do I connect with in that act of willful disappearing?
What does his poem ask you?