In a crowded, smoke-filled coffeeshop of a middle-class neighborhood of Cairo, a military commander in Yemen’s Civil War laughed and sipped herbal tea as he narrated to me how he blared a Ḥūthī zāmil from his military vehicle when ambushing his enemies. The zāmil is a form of chanted folk poetry composed by tribes of the Arabian Peninsula; the Ḥūthī zāmil is a rendering of this poetry on mass media. It is enormously popular and constitutes the backbone of the group’s recruitment campaign. Its popularity stretches beyond Yemen and has become a transnational sensation on social media platforms such as YouTube and Telegram. The paradoxical practice of listening to Ḥūthī poetry while fighting them confirmed what I had already heard several times over: some of the Ḥūthīs’ enemies find the poems compelling enough to raise the morale of their own men. As such, it is a form of ḥamāsah (excitement) poetry. This paper investigates the term qūwah —"strength” or “force”— that is often ascribed to the Ḥūthī zāmil. It combines a close reading of the zāmil, “To the Frontlines My Lord Calls Me,” and analysis of ethnographic material and social media content to better understand the zāmil's salience in the Yemeni Civil War. I approach qūwah through the prisms of performance and affect, which shed light not only on how the zāmil is perceived as forceful in the Yemeni and Arab context, but also on how power is culturally and contingently constructed. Performance also allows room for the ways in which listeners, readers, and watchers of this poetry negotiate with power in the process of resisting, subverting, or embodying it. By centering affect, I move beyond a paradigm where the primary emotion associated with ḥamāsah poetry is excitement on the battlefield. Instead, I read it as an affective force that circulates, passing by and affecting those on the margins of its practice.