and my longing for the source
I don’t think it was me who wrote the poem
except when inspiration stopped
and inspiration is the luck of the skillful
when they apply themselves
The only possibility was
to love the girl who asked me:
What time is it?
on my way to the cinema.
And it was only possible for her to be a mulatta
which she was
or a passing mystery and a darkness
It’s like this the words multiply
I induce my heart to love so it has room for flowers and thorns …
My vocabulary is mystic and my desires corporeal
And I’m not who I am now unless there’s a meeting of two:
me and my feminine self
Love! What are you?
How much are you? You
and not you?
Love! Rage like a tempest over us
so we can find only what the divinities want of my body
and pour away the rest in a funnel
You – whether displayed or hidden –
have no shape
and we love you when we love
by chance
You’re the luck of the poor
Unfortunately
I often escaped love’s closure
but fortunately stayed fit enough to re-open its door!
Secretly, the canny lover says to himself:
Love is our truthful lie
Overhearing him, his beloved replies:
love comes and goes
like lightening and thunder
To life I say: slow down wait for me until intoxication has dried out in my glass
In the garden all the flowers are ours
and the wind can’t unwind itself from the rose
Wait for me so the nightingales don’t flee the town square
and make me break the rhythm
while the minstrels tighten their strings for the goodbye song
Go slow for me and be brief so the song won’t take long
lest my delivery interrupt the prelude and split it in two
let two and two make one
Long Live Life!
Take your time and take me in your arms
so the wind doesn’t scatter me
Even when I’m carried by the wind
I can’t unwind myself from the alphabet
If I hadn’t scaled the mountain
I might have been happy with an eagle’s eyrie: nothing loftier
but such glory crowned with infinite blue gold
is difficult to visit:
Up there the loner stays lonely
and can’t come down on his feet
So no eagle walks
no human flies
How much a peak resembles an abyss
You - o solitude of the summit know it!
I have no say in what I was
or will be …
It’s luck.
And luck has no name
We might name it:
the blacksmith of our fate or
the postman of the heavens or
the carpenter of the newborn’s cradle and the dead man’s coffin or
Let’s call it the legendary gods’ servant
whose lines we wrote while hiding behind Olympus …
which the hungry potters believed
but the bloated lords of gold didn’t
unluckily for their author
this ghost standing on the stage is real
Behind the scenes it’s something else
the question is no longer: When?
but: Why? How? And Who?
Who am I to say to you
what I’m saying?
It’s possible not to have been
suppose the convoy fell into an ambush
and suppose the family lost a son
like the one now writing this poem
letter by letter
bleeding and bleeding
on this sofa
blood black as black
not a crow’s ink
nor its caw
it’s the whole night squeezed out by hand
drop by drop
by the hand of luck and talent
It’s possible that poetry might have gained more
if precisely this poet hadn’t existed
a hoopoe at the edge of the abyss
Though the poet might say: If I’d been another
I would become only me again
This is how I bluff:
Narcissus wasn’t as beautiful as he thought.
His creators trapped him in his reflection
so I ripple the smooth image with droplets of water …
Suppose he’d been able to see someone other than himself
and could have seen the love of a girl gazing at him
forget the stags running between the lilies and daisies …
if he’d been just a fraction cleverer
and seen how much he was like to others
Yet if he’d been free
he wouldn’t have become a myth …
In the desert the mirage is the traveler’s book
and without it
without the mirage
he won’t continue searching for water
There’s a cloud, he tells himself carrying his jug of hope in one hand and clutching his belly with the other
and he thumbs his errors into the sand
to corral the clouds into a pit
And the mirage calls him, lures, misleads him
then lifts him up:
read if you can’t read
write if you can’t write
So he reads: water water water
and writes a sentence in the sand:
without the mirage I wouldn’t be alive til now
And it’s the luck of the traveler that
hope is the twin of despair
or else his improvised poetry
When the sky is grey
and I see a rose sprouting through the cracks in a wall
I don’t say: the sky is grey
but keep my eye on the rose and tell it:
it’s quite a day!
Just as at nightfall
I say to my two friends:
If there has to be a dream
let it be like us and simple
For example: after two days
the three of us will dine
to fete our dream’s premonition
that after two days
not one of us will have been lost
So let’s celebrate in the moon’s sonata
and make a toast to the lenience of death
who saw the three of us happy together
and decided to look the other way!
I don’t say: far away life is real with its imaginary places
I say: life here is possible
By chance this land became holy
its lakes hills and trees aren’t replicas of those in paradise
It became holy because a prophet walked here
prayed on a rock that began to weep
and the mount fell down from fear of God
then passed out
And by chance the slope of a field in this country
becomes a museum of dust
because too many soldiers from both sides die there
defending two leaders
who waiting in two silken tents for their spoils
give the order to Charge!
Soldiers die time and again without ever knowing who won
Meanwhile the surviving storytellers say:
if by chance the others had won!
History’s headlines could have been different
O land I love you green
Green
an apple dancing in water and light
Green
your night
green, your dawn green
so plant me with the tenderness of a mother’s hand
in a handful of air
I am one of your seeds
Green …
That stanza has more than one poet
and it’s possible it didn’t have to be lyrical
Who am I to say to you
what I’m saying?
It would have been possible not to be who I am
It would have been possible not to be here …
it would have been possible
if the plane had crashed that morning with me on board
Luckily I’m a late riser
and missed the flight
It would have been possible never to have visited Cairo Damascus the Louvre and other magical cities
If I’d been walking slower
the rifle shot might have cut my shadow off from
the watchful cypress
If I’d been walking faster
I might have been shattered to pieces by shrapnel
and become a passing thought
It’s possible if I’d dreamed more excessively
I might have lost my memory
Luckily I sleep alone
and listen carefully to my body
and believe in my gift for discerning pain
in time to call the doctor
ten minutes before dying
Ten minutes is enough for me to live by chance
and to defy nothingness
Who am I to defy nothingness?
who am I? who am I?
Notes
1.Nūn: Letter of the Arabic alphabet similar to the letter N. It is known as Nun al-Nisswa (the feminizing N) as it is used as a suffix indicating plural feminine nouns in the present tense. In contrast to the norm of most Arabic dialects, the colloquial dialect of Darwish’s western Galilee uses the feminine suffix hun instead of the masculine hum for both masculine and feminine objects in the plural.
2.Jahili Mu’allaqaat: Pre-Islamic “hanging poems.” These were the seven greatest poems of the pre-Islamic era that, according to (later) medieval literary lore, were given the honour of being hung from the walls of the Ka’aba in Mecca.
I made these drawings during the days immediately following the news of Mahmoud Darwish’s untimely death on 9 August 2008. Whilst living with and translating over many, many months the two long poems that constitute this book, we had grown accustomed to imagining his speaking voice and anticipating hearing it again.
He writes in the poems about those he loves and about himself whilst continually bantering with Death. Nevertheless we were unprepared for his voice no longer being audible – except on CDs. The drawings were made in an attempt to fill such an abrupt silence.
And then something happened, for Mahmoud’s written lines began, like rhizome plants, to intermingle and entwine with the drawn lines, and this was a kind of reply.