In the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, scholars of Arabic literature are revisiting Iraqi poet Nazik Al-Malaika’s Cholera (1947), a free verse poem that was groundbreaking in terms of its innovative subversion of conventional verse. Restricted by the limitations of metrical conventions, Al-Malaika later explained that free verse was what enabled her to express the grief she felt upon hearing news coverage of the rising death toll in Egypt. The refrain of the poem “death, death, death” is repeated at the end of each stanza and is meant to mimic the sounds of the horse carts dragging the bodies of cholera victims. Through poetic language, death remains at the center of the poem and its transcendental reality is apparent in the unrelenting force of the cholera virus. Drawing upon Jacque Derrida’s work on the relationship between death and language, the paper examines the way the theme of death is reimagined in different metaphorical layers, through the use of metonymy and synecdoche. The paper will also draw on Benedict Anderson’s work on nationalism and his argument regarding the symbolic significance of death, and the role it plays in the construction of collectivities in order to examine the way the poem integrates tropes of death with questions of nationalism. The poem ends with a lamentation about Egypt: “O Egypt, my feelings are torn apart by what death has done,” suggesting an identification and solidarity with Egypt, at a time when political crises were fueling Arab nationalism. The dead body in the poem becomes a venue for patriotic sentiment in relation to the symbolic birth of Arab nationalism.