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“But we’re nearing the pomegranate season,” my father said, on August 19, 2024, when I asked him and my mother to leave our village in South Lebanon.
In Lebanon, the pomegranate season runs from September to November. It is the densest harvest period of the year, when many crops mature at once and livelihoods are secured. During this time, people move from gathering to harvesting—figs, oranges, grapes, carob, tobacco, sesame, lentils, za’atar, rosemary, and sage. As the season advances, work shifts again, from harvesting to preserving.
What is gathered is prepared to last. Among the many fruits of the land: tenderness. This is the time of year when love is most often revealed and bonds are renewed.
Hajje Fatme pounds za’atar while her closest friend sifts it beside her. Amo Morshed calls me to come pick the first three quinces he gathered, along with two jars of honey for my father. Across the South, families rise before dawn to shake their olive trees together. My mother hands me bottles of oil—one for Batoul, and another for whomever I love most. A fisherman I see every morning leaves me half of his pomegranate with a note on the shore.
December, 2024: We return from foreign villages in the North to our own. Branches heavy with lemons, vines climbing through rubble, burned beehives with darkened honey. As for the pomegranates, they have split open. Their flesh is exposed, their arils are crushed into the soil. A dark red scatters all across our backyard. Is this the blood of the moon-faced man who carried his weapon?
The pomegranate season runs from September to November.
By December, we gather in cemeteries, to honor those who made it possible for tenderness to be harvested, carried, and preserved.
Rabab Chamseddine is a Lebanese photographer and poet based between Tyre, South Lebanon, and Beirut. Her work has appeared in We Call to the Eye & the Night: Love Poems by Writers of Arab Heritage (2023, Persea Books), New York War Crimes: Land Day Edition (2025), Discontent’s Revolution Until Victory issue (2025), Afikra’s Daftar (2026), and was exhibited in Ya Rayeh Aal Janoub (July 2024), a collaborative event organized with the Beirut Art Center.
Her practice explores intimate, often overlooked relationships between people and land, weaving themes of love, loss, and the homemaking that emerges from holding both.
Rabab Chamseddine is a Lebanese photographer and poet based between Tyre, South Lebanon, and Beirut. Her work has appeared in We Call to the Eye & the Night: Love Poems by Writers of Arab Heritage (2023, Persea Books), New York War Crimes: Land Day Edition (2025), Discontent’s Revolution Until Victory issue (2025), Afikra’s Daftar (2026), and was exhibited in Ya Rayeh Aal Janoub (July 2024), a collaborative event organized with the Beirut Art Center.
Her practice explores intimate, often overlooked relationships between people and land, weaving themes of love, loss, and the homemaking that emerges from holding both.
