This poem is republished from Water & Salt by Lena Khalaf Tuffaha, a guest at Amherst College’s eleventh annual literary festival. Register and see the full list of LitFest 2026 events here.
Do not name your daughters Shaymaa,
courage will march them
into the bullet path of dictators.
Do not name them Sundus,
the garden of paradise calls out to its marigolds,
gathers its green leaves up in its embrace.
Do not name your children Malak or Raneem,
angels want the companionship of others like them,
their silvery wings trailing the filth of jail cells,
the trill of their laughter a call to prayer.
Do not name your sons Hamza.
Do not taunt the torturer’s whip
with promises of steadfastness.
Do not name your sons
Muhammad Ahed Zakaria Ismail,
they will become seashells, disappear in the sand.
Do not name your children. Let them live
nameless, seal their eyelids
and sell their voices to the nightingale.
Do not name your children
and if you must
call them by what withstands
this endless season of decay.
Name them mountains,
call them stone.
Lena Khalaf Tuffaha is a poet, essayist and translator. She is the author of three books of poetry: Something About Living, winner of the 2024 National Book Award and the 2022 Akron Poetry Prize; Kaan and Her Sisters, finalist for the 2024 Firecracker Award and honorable mention for the 2024 Arab American Book Award; and Water & Salt, winner of the 2018 Washington State Book Award and honorable mention for the 2018 Arab American Book Award. Her writing has appeared in journals including Los Angeles Review of Books, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Nation, Poets.org, Protean, Prairie Schooner and many others. Tuffaha’s work has also been anthologized widely, including in The Long Devotion, We Call to the Eye & the Night and Gaza Unsilenced. She earned her bachelor of arts in comparative literature from the University of Washington and an M.F.A. from Pacific Lutheran University’s Rainier Writing Workshop. Tuffaha lives with her family in Redmond, Wash.
