Mahmoud Darwish

[shereads]

I was googling a favorite line from a poem yesterday, and learned that the poet died this year - in August, early enough to miss the latest ugliness in his homeland. If there's peace where Mahmoud Darwish is now, it's the first his generation of Palestinians has known.

I Come From There

I come from there and I have memories
Born as mortals are, I have a mother
And a house with many windows,
I have brothers, friends,
And a prison cell with a cold window.
Mine is the wave, snatched by sea-gulls,
I have my own view,
And an extra blade of grass.
Mine is the moon at the far edge of the words,
And the bounty of birds,
And the immortal olive tree.
I walked this land before the swords
Turned its living body into a laden table.

I come from there. I render the sky unto her mother
When the sky weeps for her mother.
And I weep to make myself known
To a returning cloud.
I learnt all the words worthy of the court of blood
So that I could break the rule.
I learnt all the words and broke them up
To make a single word: Homeland.....

 

[shereads]

"We are the guests of eternity"

 

[damppanties]

Beautiful poem.

 

[shereads]

A favorite passage:

Soon we'll be uttering our last praises of this place,
gazing at tomorrow
with the silks of old speech trailing behind us.
We'll see our dreams in corridors
looking all over for us
and for the eagle of our blackened flags.
A desert for sound and a desert for silence,
a desert for eternal absurdity,
a desert for the tablets of the law,
a desert for school books, prophets and scientists,
a desert for Shakespeare,
a desert for those who look for God in the human being,
the last Arab writes:
I am the Arab that never was,
the Arab that never was.

-- from "A horse for the stranger (to an Iraqi poet)"