And then, they reached the sea. So much water. So much thirst.
The Child Followed
In the fractured silence of Gaza, where buildings fall faster than they are built, a child watched a donkey pass by. There was no street, only what remained of one, broken stones, rebars curled like dead vines, dust that rose with each step.
The donkey moved slowly, as if time itself had slowed to match its pace. It carried empty jugs lashed with twine, a cloth that once wrapped bread now clung to dust, and a bundle of herbs, wilted and grey, their scent long vanished. It knew the way by memory.
The child followed.
She passed craters filled with rubble, walls riddled with holes, and rooms with no roofs where a few families still lived. But in the crevices, life pushed back. A grandmother boiled tea over a flame made from twigs. A boy flew a kite made from scraps of foil and shrapnel paper, stitched together like a map of everything broken, and still, it soared. Someone had painted a bird in flight on a concrete slab.
They passed the splintered remains of a millenary olive trunk, gnarled, hollowed, blackened by fire. It had once stood in quiet dignity, older than stones, its roots deep in the soil of ancestors. Now it lay shattered by something unnatural, something that feared life. Yet even in ruin, it spoke. The child paused as the donkey stepped gently around it, and she placed her hand on the twisted wood. The grain shimmered with rings of gold and ash, and in the crevices, green shoots, timid, defiant, reached for light. The donkey waited.
Further along, the donkey led them past a fallen wall. Behind it, a mural had survived, faded, but still breathing. A wedding scene, drawn in charcoal and ochre, bride and groom beneath a canopy of orange blossoms. The rest of the house was gone, but the joy remained, stubborn and still. The donkey passed without comment. The child looked up, then down, smiled and moved on.
At what had once been a bakery, the donkey paused. Its head turned slightly, ears flicking at dust. The clay oven stood empty beneath the open sky. A round of dough, forgotten or left behind, had hardened on the warm stone, un-risen, uneaten. The scent of thyme still clung to the air, barely. The child looked to the donkey as if to ask something, but the donkey did not speak. It simply stepped forward again.
Near a crater filled with rubble, the child wandered a few steps to the side and found a schoolbag half-buried in sand. It was pink, its strap torn. Inside were notebooks, smudged but still legible, Arabic letters, math problems, the name of a girl written three times on the inside cover. She flipped through the pages slowly, lips moving as she read a sentence aloud under her breath. Then she closed the book gently, placed it back in the bag, and stood up.
The path wound through what once had been a market. Only fragments remained: a bent scale, a broken umbrella, a rusted sign that read Olives, sweet lemons, soap from Nablus.And still, the donkey walked. And the child followed.
The Radiant City has fallen, but the Donkey remembers the Path
They passed a doorway standing alone, the house around it long collapsed into dust. It leaned slightly, its wood weathered by sun and wind; a metal shard had penetrated it, but it stood, defiant, unburied. On the door itself, someone had written in charcoal:
المدينة المشرقة تهدمت، ولكن الحمار يعرف الطريق.
(The radiant city has fallen, but the donkey remembers the path).
The child stepped closer. She read the words slowly, her eyes moving across the grain of the wood. Faint traces of green clung to the lower panels, and a reddish outline still lingered along the frame, colours faded, but still present, still resisting time. The black of the charcoal gave the words weight. Together, the hues whispered of something larger than the door itself: the memory of a place, a people, a flag not flown but still visible.
She looked back at the donkey, who stood silently in the dust, as if waiting. Without a word, she bent down, picked up a smooth stone warmed by the sun, and placed it gently at the base of the door. A gesture of remembrance. A marker on the path. The wind shifted. The light thinned. The donkey turned and began walking again, slow and steady. The child rose to her feet and followed. They walked in silence for a long time, through stretches of broken land and silence, until the sound of waves grew louder, salt in the air.
And then, They reached the Sea. So much Water. So much Thirst.
Waves rolled in, foaming and wild, but the salt stung her lips before she even spoke. She looked down at her small hands, dusty and dry, then back at the water. Her tongue moved across her lips, trying to moisten them, but the thirst was deep, hollow, reaching all the way to her chest. The child stepped onto the broken shoreline, part sand, mostly shattered debris and scattered flotsam. She stared at the endless blue water that, only months ago, had washed over her skin, cooling her like a veil beneath the sun. But now, the child didn’t feel it was her sea anymore.
It surged in and out with restless energy, churning and foaming at the edges, as if trying to speak. Not to her. Not in anger. But in warning—as though the deep no longer wished for anyone to enter, aware of the danger hidden beneath its beauty. Still, it welcomed her gaze. It came close, then pulled away, again and again, grieving in its own rhythm.
The donkey stood beside her, its hooves leaving shallow imprints in the windblown sand. It turned its head slowly. Its large grey eyes met the child’s. They were old eyes, older than memory, full of dust and patience and the quiet burden of knowing. And in that still moment, the donkey thought, not in words, but in something deeper: “ Ah, if only my eyes could cry. They could relieve her thirst.”
But the donkey did not cry. It never had. It had carried sorrow across deserts, through ruins, under fire and sun, but its tears had long ago dried up in service to endurance. The child leaned against its side. The salt wind tangled her hair. The waves kept coming, offering everything and nothing. And the donkey stood beside her, unmoving, as the sea glittered with the unreachable promise of water. The donkey moved on, and the child followed. The wind tangled her hair and filled her ears with the endless murmur of waves, waves that quenched no thirst.
My City Will Rise Again: Daring and Bright.
They walked along the fractured edge of land, where living architecture had turned to instant ruins. Walls had crumbled into jagged outlines, roofs collapsed inward like broken lungs. Ghosts of rooms remained—half-lives open to the sky, door frames leading nowhere, the quiet evidence of what once was shelter. At one place, a charred child’s satin shoe. They kept walking. Now and then, the donkey would pause and sniff the air. The child said nothing. There was nothing to ask, nothing to answer. Only the wind. Only the smell of salt and ash.
Then the donkey stopped. No tug of the rope, no gentle call could move it. As much as she prodded, pleaded, and circled back, it remained still—its body rooted, its eyes fixed on something unseen. And it was then that she heard it. A sound, soft and persistent. Like breath through stone. A whisper beneath the rubble. She turned.
There, behind a mound of shattered concrete and twisted railings, she heard it again, gluk…gluk…gluk,a pulse, like the heartbeat of the earth. She scrambled forward, pulling aside the debris with both hands. Beneath the ruin, where something once fell from the sky to destroy, now a spring had opened, clear water bubbling up, quiet and certain, into the crater’s hollow. She knelt, reached down, cupped her small hands, and drank slowly, quenching her thirst. The coolness stung her cracked lips, but her body welcomed it as if it had been waiting forever.
She looked back at the donkey. It had not moved, but its head was low, eyes half-closed. She cupped her hands again, held them tight, and brought the water to the donkey’s mouth. It drank slowly, silently. When they had both drunk their fill, the child reached into her pocket. She drew out the last of the olive shoots, green, tender, resilient, and pressed them gently into the damp soil beside the spring. Her hands smoothed the earth around it with care. The donkey watched her.
The sea continued to churn behind them. The salt wind did not stop. The sun, low on the horizon, spilled its final light across the broken land. It lingered on the tender shoot, warming its trembling leaves, then slid across the surface of the crater’s water, not just reflecting, but answering with radiance. The child and the donkey watched in silence. The light touched them both, warm and golden. And though no words were spoken, each seemed to understand what was written once in charcoal, now rising in memory:
سَتَنْهَضُ مَدِينَتِي مِنْ جَدِيد:جَرِيئَة وَمُتَلَأْلِئَة
(My City Will Rise Again: Daring and Bright.)
