Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

–WB Yeats, “The Second Coming”
*

I write this essay because to stay quiet while my world is being erased would be a betrayal too deep to bear. The world no longer presents itself in coherent phrases. Its meaning stutters, fragments. The syntax of reason splinters by the hour. Moral vocabulary has been absorbed into the language of force, and grief now shares its grammar with the machinery that manufactures it. We are no longer living within a history that unfolds—we are spiraling through one that corrodes. Gaza, in this ongoing catastrophe, cannot be regarded as a distant territory. It has become the trembling fulcrum upon which the gyre of moral collapse turns.

W.B. Yeats, writing from the tremors of a collapsing world, understood history as something more cyclical than progressive—shaped by spiraling forces that never resolve, only repeat. In A Vision, he charted time through interlocking gyres, each composed of opposing energies: discord expanding as concord recedes. “The gyre of concord diminishes as that of discord increases,” he wrote, imagining not an arc of justice but a rhythm of erosion. These gyres do not move gently. They fracture what came before. They grind through meaning, sever memory from consequence, loosen language from truth. We now dwell entirely inside the gyre of discord, spinning at terrifying velocity, no longer orbiting a center—because the center no longer holds. Its gravity has collapsed beneath the weight of repetition and moral fatigue. And Gaza, stripped bare of illusion, stands at the raw core of that collapse. It is not a rupture from history’s pattern; it is the place where the pattern lays itself bare.

This is the anatomy of discord. The ground beneath our feet carries the bruise of centuries. The streets do not merely echo despair; they materialize it—split and scorched, mapped in craters and dust. Stone remembers more than language can bear. In this ruined cartography, Yeats’s spirals breathe with terrible clarity. “Turning and turning in the widening gyre,” he wrote, as if foreseeing the exact violence that would one day become ordinary. The spiral widens until the world loses the ability to name what is being done. One rotation devours another, and still the momentum accelerates. The sacred axis—once imagined as conscience, or law, or shared humanity—no longer anchors anything. It has been reduced to ash and data, drowned in the sound of drones and the indifference of high-resolution satellites. What hope lies in this eternal weaving when the center has vanished, when the sacred axis gives way to smoke and blood and the ever-falling sound of a drone?

The falcon no longer hears the falconer. The voice that once steadied its wings has gone silent beneath the rubble. The skies above Gaza are filled with motion, yet movement here offers no direction. Flight remains, but its meaning has inverted. What once carried the promise of return now signals erasure. Surveillance, targeting, disappearance—these are the new verbs of air. In this place, the gyre is no longer allegory. It is the shape of days. It is the rhythm of hunger and silence. It is the line that turns and turns and never finds rest.

Hunger now governs time. It becomes the unrelenting measure by which each hour is known.

There is a photograph—one of many I can no longer push from my mind. A young man lies motionless on a makeshift cart of cardboard and broken wood, his body arched unnaturally, already stiffened by death. His shirt is stained with blood, and his limbs extend in a posture that almost resembles a question mark. Around him, others move through the wreckage, their expressions unreadable. Grief has etched itself too many times into their faces to remain visible. Behind them, the sea waits in silence. It offers no metaphor, no escape—only a gaze, as mute and unblinking as the dust-covered walls around it.

That young man, like so many others, was likely searching for flour. People die here on the way to aid. They collapse in the space between desperation and delivery. The centers are called shelters, yet the word has lost its meaning. They have become sites of punishment, arenas of hunger. The hand that extends toward food is met with bullets, with metal, with disdain measured out as policy.

Hunger now governs time. It becomes the unrelenting measure by which each hour is known. It rewires the body’s understanding of itself, distorting perception, dulling memory, blurring the boundary between emotion and need. When it arrives, it does not knock or whisper—it dismantles. Longing mutates into nausea. Anxiety folds into cramping silence. Hunger enters without permission and rearranges everything—how we think, how we feel, how we move through the hours. My own senses have started to betray me. Food no longer tastes the way I remember it. My body mistakes fear for emptiness, exhaustion for need. I reach for water and feel panic instead. There are moments when I cannot eat even when food is near. Something deep inside refuses it. Something else insists that the feeling might not be hunger at all, just a different kind of loss.

My own senses have started to betray me. Food no longer tastes the way I remember it. My body hesitates before food. I sometimes sit in front of a plate and cannot bring myself to move. The taste of nourishment has shifted; it arrives with bitterness, as though shame clings to every bite. My mouth mistranslates the food it receives, my stomach mistakes fullness for something more sinister. I have begun to fear the sensation of being full in the same way I fear the ache of emptiness. My body no longer deciphers its signals correctly. Comfort and suffering now speak the same language.

In the streets, I see children crouched low to the ground, scraping flour from the dirt. They move slowly, with concentration, as if they are memorizing each grain.

A message from a friend used to arrive after midnight filled with questions about books, cities we dreamed of walking through, lines of poetry passed back and forth like shared breath. We spoke of Lisbon’s tiled alleys, of Granada’s gardens, of love, of work, of future arrangements made under the illusion that time belonged to us. Now the message contains only three words: I am hungry. The sentence no longer belongs to literature. It refuses ornament. It carries no rhythm, no metaphor, no distance from the wound. It is the body’s most immediate truth, stripped of thought. Language collapses in the face of that kind of need.

In the streets, I see children crouched low to the ground, scraping flour from the dirt. They move slowly, with concentration, as if they are memorizing each grain. Their hands sift dust from food without complaint. There are no cries. No dramatics. Only the steady labor of survival. Hunger has become a shared grammar, a collective motion passed silently from child to child, from hand to mouth. The world once responded to these images with shock. Now it turns away. People have stopped flinching.

I remember another child: he once mistook earth for bread. He was walking beneath the open sky, his clothes streaked with white flour, his hair matted with dust and sweat. He had just returned from a failed attempt to get aid, from the chaos of an overcrowded distribution point where he fought to reach a sack of flour and failed. His body carried the powdery trace of what he had tried to bring home. At one point, he bent down, scooped a handful of dirt from the ground, and brought it to his mouth. A camera caught him in that moment, just before he turned and said, “We are hungry. We eat sand and dust.” His voice held no protest, only exhaustion. The exhaustion of someone whose world has been emptied of alternatives.

We are dizzy, drained, barely human, clinging to the frayed edges of dignity, not because we were born weak, but because we are being emptied by design.

But this was not always so. This child was born in Gaza, like so many of us. He was raised in a place where we used to say, with quiet pride, no one sleeps hungry in Gaza. Neighbors shared what they had, even when it was little. Bread was divided, not hoarded. A bowl of lentils could be stretched miraculously across five plates. In our childhood, hunger was never holy, but it was met with hands. No child ate alone. No child ate dust. Hunger speaks with too much truth to allow distance. Words fracture in the presence of such clarity. Poetry retreats. Even metaphor seems dishonest. What remains is only the obligation to remember what the body endures when the world chooses to look away.

I cannot explain to the outside world how ordinary things—the right to desire, to imagine, to plan—no longer arrive to us. The mundane gifts of modernity, so freely available elsewhere, are withheld here with cosmic indifference. We are dizzy, drained, barely human, clinging to the frayed edges of dignity, not because we were born weak, but because we are being emptied by design. And still, we move. We walk toward aid centers with the weight of necessity pressing into our backs. This movement is not guided by belief in safety, nor by the illusion of care, but by the sheer instinct to continue. The alternative is slower, quieter, death through stillness.

Those who risk nothing are taken by hunger all the same. And in the end, we will die, this we say without ceremony, because we have been forced to practice the sentence too many times. Each step toward these centers carries a question we no longer dare to voice. It is no longer about survival. The question has shifted. We now ask ourselves how long it will take for our names to be added to the growing silence. The ledger of the erased lengthens daily. And I find myself calculating the disappearance, not of bodies alone, but of meaning. I try to understand how long it takes to empty a city of its soul. The process is precise. The erasure is methodical. It is carried out through curfews and starvation, through noise and neglect. It is architecture, the kind that doesn’t build, but unbuilds.

In 2024, I wrote something that now feels like it had been waiting for this moment to return:

Hunger hung in the air, a weight on everyone. You could see it in people’s faces—the hollowness in their eyes… Hunger doesn’t just take from the body; it drains the spirit… I’ve lost weight, like so many others here in the north. I’ve felt my body weaken, my mind blur under the weight of famine and fear. Walking through the streets, carrying my bag, I cried without even realizing it… Survival is not living. It’s just existing, day to day, moment to moment, waiting for it all to end.

I did not understand then how suffering repeats itself. It circles back with greater precision each time, more efficient, more stripped of illusion. What we call survival is only another form of dying, a prolonged unraveling of body and thought. The gyre, as Yeats wrote, turns again. It tightens around us with the rhythm of a prophecy we no longer need to interpret.

Yeats stares into the spiral he once traced on paper, seeing it now take shape in dust and smoke. His eyes carry the astonishment of a man who never wanted to be right.

And so, I sit now with the poets and the dead. At our table: the ghost of Yeats, the shadow of Imru’ al-Qais, and the bitter heat of a drink brewed from memory. They roasted chickpeas to stand in for coffee, adding the last scattered grains of real beans, just enough to tint the water, not enough to change its nature. We drink in silence, because rituals must endure even when everything else has unraveled. Yeats stares into the spiral he once traced on paper, seeing it now take shape in dust and smoke. His eyes carry the astonishment of a man who never wanted to be right. Imru’ al-Qais leans forward, his voice weathered and low, and speaks the line I can never forget:

فلو أنها نفس تموت جميعها ولكنها نفس تساقط أنفسا

If only the soul could die all at once—
but it falls apart, one self at a time.

That is Gaza. It is a sustained dismantling of the soul. We do not vanish all at once. We fall in stages, hunger, disillusionment, dispossession, numbness. And still, we write. Still, we speak. Because to name this is to resist its totality.

I think of Yarmouk Camp in Syria. I remember watching the famine there on television. I was younger, still living with the illusion that distance could soften pain. I cried in front of the screen, overwhelmed by a heaviness I could not yet name. I believed then that my sadness meant understanding. I did not know I was wrong until I lived it. What I saw in Yarmouk now lives in me. And you, dear reader—no matter how sensitive you are, no matter how open your heart—will never truly be able to describe this feeling. Hunger is not a story. It cannot be narrated from afar. It must be survived to be known.

Someone, somewhere, must remember that we were human here. Even in the hour of ash. Even as the gyre devours the sun.

What Yeats foresaw as the Second Coming was never a promise of salvation. It was revelation—a monstrous birth in the dust, a moment when history folds in on itself and delivers not progress, but reckoning. Gaza is that reckoning. Here, the myths that once sustained the imagination of modern civilization—human rights, international law, moral values—shatter under the weight of their own contradictions. Their language fails to touch the ground. Their principles are too delicate to survive impact. They collapse where the bomb lands, where the children fall.

The falcon no longer returns. The center cannot hold. And we, spinning in the widening gyre, are left to decide whether to look away or to speak. We either become spectators of collapse, or chroniclers of what once held. I have chosen the latter. I will continue to write, even if my voice arrives faintly beneath the rubble. Even if only a single sentence survives the ruins. Someone, somewhere, must remember that we were human here. Even in the hour of ash. Even as the gyre devours the sun.

Yeats’s spirals, once dismissed as the wild diagrams of a mystic, now settle over this place like soot. What once looked like esoteric symbols now resemble maps drawn too early. His falcon still circles, but the sky above Gaza offers no axis, no return path, no center to descend toward, only a deepening orbit around an absence no language can fill.

And so I sit in this hour before the sun dares to show itself, surrounded by the smoke of yesterday’s hope. The world has turned again. The gyre of discord expands without pause. And the question that presses now, heavy and unrelenting, is no longer philosophical. It is physical. It weighs on the chest like grief that cannot speak: When the spiral has spent all its violence, what rises from the center, if there is still a center left at all?