In Palestinian poet Fadwā Ṭuqān’s two poems, Lan abkī (“I Will Not Cry”) and Waḥsha: mustawḥā min qānūn a-jādhibiyya (“Longing: Inspired by the Law of Gravity”), she utilizes the poetic features of Arabic’s pre-Islamic literary tradition to both pay homage to the Arabic qaṣīda, and address losses particular to Palestinian history. In her lyric poems, Ṭuqān incorporates the naṣīb, the elegiac prelude, and the aṭlāl, the lament of the abandoned encampment — to reflect upon the grief that Palestinians have endured in the wake of the naksa (set back) of the 1967 War — and which they continued to experience during the Second Palestinian Intifada (uprising) in 2002. By citing allusions to, and utilizing conventions from pre-Islamic jāhilī poetry, Ṭuqān invokes the long existing tradition that relates Arabic poetry to loss. She personifies the Palestinians’ vulnerability through the mobilization of language and references to different demarcations of time. Ṭuqān spotlights the precarity of Palestinians’ lives which are devoid of sovereignty and state protection, revealing the ways in which Palestinian experience is punctuated by violent ruptures and continued mourning. Even though the two works explore expressions of bereavement and dispossession, they distinctively incorporate attributes of classical Arabic poetry to remark on variant forms of loss in Palestine. Specifically, while in Lan abkī the poet halts in the late 1960s to weep at the traces of the material ḥuṭām (ruins) of the Palestinians’ homes in Yaffa, in Waḥsha: mustawḥā min qānūn a-jādhibiyya, Ṭuqān ruminates on losses that are both more intimate and metaphysical. In the 2002 poem, it is al-waqt, or “time” itself that is being commemorated. Notably, in her opening verse, Ṭuqān proclaims, rakaḍa al-waqt (“time ran away”) — illuminating how time is elusive and cannot be fully inhabited or possessed — and additionally, how mourning persists in the present and has become a routine aspect of everyday life. While one can read Ṭuqān’s later work as a means of individual reflection in the final years of her life, this paper will analyze the ways in which her meditations on time also delineate how national and communal belonging coincide with personal expressions of lament in Palestine. As highlighted through the imagery in these two works — and through resonances of jāhilī poetry — Ṭuqān deploys her verses to underscore how for Palestinians, there maintains an ineluctable link between ordinary life and elegy.