Deema K. Shehabi

Deema K. Shehabi is a poet, writer, and editor. She grew up in the Arab world and attended college in the US, where she received an MS in journalism. Her poems have appeared widely in journals and anthologies such as The Kenyon Review, Literary Imagination, New Letters, Callaloo, Massachusetts Review, Perihelion, Drunken Boat, Bat City Review, Inclined to Speak: An Anthology of Contemporary Arab American Poetry, and The Poetry of Arab Women. Her poems have been nominated for a Pushcart prize three times, and she served as Vice-President for the Radius of Arab-American Writers (RAWI) between 2007 and 2010. She currently resides in Northern California with her husband and two sons. 

Praise for Thirteen Departures from the Moon

“Scribble this little map/on a torn napkin—" but Deema Shehabi's map is huge and deep as she weaves the threads of landscape, earth and sky, into a cloth wide enough to cover everyone. Her grandfather was the mayor of Gaza—in his light, in the light of her precious mother and her people's ongoing pain, with a stunning lyrical gift of seeing and knowing, she walks the wide world through language that redeems and blesses. Her poems are crucial, passionate, magnificent.

—Naomi Shihab Nye, author of 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East

Sometimes a new poet appears who has a generous field of vision, a craft at once well-honed and extravagant, and a unique point of view, with narratives that could belong to no one else—a poet who, by being of her specific time and place, writes for the widest world. As Anglophone readers greeted the emergence of Derek Walcott, Yusef Komunyakaa or Eavan Boland, so must we open our eyes and our minds to the poems of Deema Shehabi.

—Marilyn Hacker, author of Names

The first poem from
thirteen departures from the moon

MIGRANT EARTH

So tell me what you think of when the sky is ashen?
—Mahmoud Darwish

I could tell you that listening is made for the ashen sky,
and instead of the muezzin’s voice, which lingers
like weeping at dawn,
I hear my own desire, as I lay my lips against my mother’s cheek.

I kneel down beside her, recalling her pleas
the day she flung open the gates of her house
for children fleeing from tanks.

My mother is from Gaza, but what do I know of the
migrant earth,
as I enter a Gazan rooftop and perform ablutions in the ashen
forehead of sky? As my soul journeys and wrinkles with
homeland?

I could tell you that I parted with my mother at the country
of skin. In the dream,
my lips were bruised, her body was whole again, and we danced
naked in the street.

And no child understands absence past the softness
of palms.

As though it is praise in my father’s palms
as he washes my mother’s body in the final ritual.

As though it is God’s pulse that comes across
her face and disappears.