Mahoud Darwish Mahoud Darwish was born in 1941 in Birwa near Acre. He died in 2008. Through his familys and his own experience he had suffered profoundly the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian homelands. He had been actively involved in the cultural dimension of the PLO. His books include Asafir Bila Ajniha (Wingless Birds, 1960), Awraq al-Zaytun (Olive Leaves, 1964), Ashiq Min Filastin (A lover from Palestine. 1966, 1970), Uhibbuki aw la Uhibbuki (I love you, I love you not, 1972), Qasida Bayrut (Ode to Beirut, 1982) and Madih al-Zill ali-Ali ( A Eulogy for the Tall Shadow, 1982). As a poet, Darwish was both deeply personal and political. His personal love poems fuse with the political in the most extraordinary way: it is as if the aisling (beautiful maiden) of Jacobean Irish poetry (symbolising Ireland) became, as did not happen in Irish) a carnate, real woman. Darwish was probably the most distinguished living Palestinian poet at the time of his death, and he was justly known throughout the Arab world as the poet of Palestinian resistance. From A STATE OF SIEGE (Fragments) Here, on the slopes of hills, watching sunsets, facing the cannons of time, here by orchards with severed shadows, we do what prisoners what the unemployed do: we nurse hope. This siege will last until we teach our enemy selections of pre-Islamic poetry. Pain is: when the housewife doesnt set up the clothesline in the morning and preoccupies herself with the cleanness of the flag. The soldiers gauge the distance between being and nothingness with a tanks telescope. We gauge the distance between our bodies and shells with the sixth sense. You who stand on our doorstep, come in and drink with us Arabic coffee [you might feel you are humans like us]. You who stand on our doorstep get out of our mornings so we can be certain we are humans like you. Behind the soldiers, the pine trees and minarets keep the sky from arching downward. Behind the iron fence soldiers pee-- guarded by tanks-- and this autumn day keeps up its golden stroll in a street wide as a church after Sunday prayer. A humorous writer once said to me: If I knew the end, from the beginning, I would have no business with words. The siege will last until those who lay the siege feel, like the besieged, that boredom is a human attribute. To resist means to maintain the soundness of the heart and testicles and your interminable disease: hope. Writing is a puppy biting the void; it wounds without blood. Our coffee cups, the birds and green trees with blue shade, and sun leaping from wall toward another wall, like a gazelle, and water in clouds of endless forms spread across whatever ration of sky is left for us, and things whose remembrance is deferred and this morning, strong and luminous— all beckon we are guests of eternity. Source: Al Karmel, Fall, 2001. Translated by Sharif Elmusa
Posted on: Tue, 05 Aug 2014 18:20:18 +0000