Mahmoud Darwish

A stranger on the riverbank, like the river ... water binds me to your name. Nothing brings me back from my faraway to my palm tree: not peace and not war. Nothing makes me enter the gospels. Not a thing ... nothing sparkles from the shore of ebb and flow between the Euphrates and the Nile. Nothing makes me descend from the pharaoh’s boats. Nothing carries me or makes me carry an idea: not longing and not promise. What will I do? What will I do without exile, and a long night that stares at the water? Water binds me to your name ... Nothing takes me from the butterflies of my dreams to my reality: not dust and not fire. What will I do without roses from Samarkand? What will I do in a theater that burnishes the singers with its lunar stones? Our weight has become light like our houses in the faraway winds. We have become two friends of the strange creatures in the clouds ... and we are now loosened from the gravity of identity’s land. What will we do … what will we do without exile, and a long night that stares at the water? Water binds me to your name ... There’s nothing left of me but you, and nothing left of you but me, the stranger massaging his stranger’s thigh: O stranger! what will we do with what is left to us of calm ... and of a snooze between two myths? And nothing carries us: not the road and not the house. Was this road always like this, from the start, or did our dreams find a mare on the hill among the Mongol horses and exchange us for it? And what will we do? What will we do without exile?

To our land, and it is the one near the word of god, a ceiling of clouds To our land, and it is the one far from the adjectives of nouns, the map of absence To our land, and it is the one tiny as a sesame seed, a heavenly horizon ... and a hidden chasm To our land, and it is the one poor as a grouse’s wings, holy books ... and an identity wound To our land, and it is the one surrounded with torn hills, the ambush of a new past To our land, and it is a prize of war, the freedom to die from longing and burning and our land, in its bloodied night, is a jewel that glimmers for the far upon the far and illuminates what’s outside it ... As for us, inside, we suffocate more!

Don’t believe our outlines, forget them and begin from your own words. As if you are the first to write poetry or the last poet. If you read our work, let it not be an extension of our airs, but to correct our errs in the book of agony. Don’t ask anyone: Who am I? You know who your mother is. As for your father, be your own. Truth is white, write over it with a crow’s ink. Truth is black, write over it with a mirage’s light. If you want to duel with a falcon soar with the falcon. If you fall in love with a woman, be the one, not she, who desires his end. Life is less alive than we think but we don’t think of the matter too much lest we hurt emotions’ health. If you ponder a rose for too long you won’t budge in a storm. You are like me, but my abyss is clear. And you have roads whose secrets never end. They descend and ascend, descend and ascend. You might call the end of youth the maturity of talent or wisdom. No doubt, it is wisdom, the wisdom of a cool non-lyric. One thousand birds in the hand don’t equal one bird that wears a tree. A poem in a difficult time is beautiful flowers in a cemetery. Example is not easy to attain so be yourself and other than yourself behind the borders of echo. Ardor has an expiration date with extended range. So fill up with fervor for your heart’s sake, follow it before you reach your path. Don’t tell the beloved, you are I and I am you, say the opposite of that: we are two guests of an excess, fugitive cloud. Deviate, with all your might, deviate from the rule. Don’t place two stars in one utterance and place the marginal next to the essential to complete the rising rapture. Don’t believe the accuracy of our instructions. Believe only the caravan’s trace. A moral is as a bullet in its poet’s heart a deadly wisdom. Be strong as a bull when you’re angry weak as an almond blossom when you love, and nothing, nothing when you serenade yourself in a closed room. The road is long like an ancient poet’s night: plains and hills, rivers and valleys. Walk according to your dream’s measure: either a lily follows you or the gallows. Your tasks are not what worry me about you. I worry about you from those who dance over their children’s graves, and from the hidden cameras in the singers’ navels. You won’t disappoint me, if you distance yourself from others, and from me. What doesn’t resemble me is more beautiful. From now on, your only guardian is a neglected future. Don’t think, when you melt in sorrow like candle tears, of who will see you or follow your intuition’s light. Think of yourself: is this all of myself? The poem is always incomplete, the butterflies make it whole. No advice in love. It’s experience. No advice in poetry. It’s talent. And last but not least, Salaam.

I am a woman. No more and no less I live my life as it is thread by thread and I spin my wool to wear, not to complete Homer’s story, or his sun. And I see what I see as it is, in its shape, though I stare every once in a while in its shade to sense the pulse of defeat, and I write tomorrow on yesterday’s sheets: there’s no sound other than echo. I love the necessary vagueness in what a night traveler says to the absence of birds over the slopes of speech and above the roofs of villages I am a woman, no more and no less The almond blossom sends me flying in March, from my balcony, in longing for what the faraway says: “Touch me and I’ll bring my horses to the water springs.” I cry for no clear reason, and I love you as you are, not as a strut nor in vain and from my shoulders a morning rises onto you and falls into you, when I embrace you, a night. But I am neither one nor the other no, I am not a sun or a moon I am a woman, no more and no less So be the Qyss of longing, if you wish. As for me I like to be loved as I am not as a color photo in the paper, or as an idea composed in a poem amid the stags … I hear Laila’s faraway scream from the bedroom: Do not leave me a prisoner of rhyme in the tribal nights do not leave me to them as news … I am a woman, no more and no less I am who I am, as you are who you are: you live in me and I live in you, to and for you I love the necessary clarity of our mutual puzzle I am yours when I overflow the night but I am not a land or a journey I am a woman, no more and no less And I tire from the moon’s feminine cycle and my guitar falls ill string by string I am a woman, no more and no less!

In Jerusalem, and I mean within the ancient walls, I walk from one epoch to another without a memory to guide me. The prophets over there are sharing the history of the holy ... ascending to heaven and returning less discouraged and melancholy, because love and peace are holy and are coming to town. I was walking down a slope and thinking to myself: How do the narrators disagree over what light said about a stone? Is it from a dimly lit stone that wars flare up? I walk in my sleep. I stare in my sleep. I see no one behind me. I see no one ahead of me. All this light is for me. I walk. I become lighter. I fly then I become another. Transfigured. Words sprout like grass from Isaiah’s messenger mouth: “If you don’t believe you won’t be safe.” I walk as if I were another. And my wound a white biblical rose. And my hands like two doves on the cross hovering and carrying the earth. I don’t walk, I fly, I become another, transfigured. No place and no time. So who am I? I am no I in ascension’s presence. But I think to myself: Alone, the prophet Muhammad spoke classical Arabic. “And then what?” Then what? A woman soldier shouted: Is that you again? Didn’t I kill you? I said: You killed me ... and I forgot, like you, to die.

In her absence I created her image: out of the earthly the hidden heavenly commences. I am here weighing the expanse with the Jahili odes ... and absence is the guide, it is the guide. For each rhyme a tent is pitched. And for each thing blowing in the wind a rhyme. Absence teaches me its lesson: If it weren’t for the mirage you wouldn’t have been steadfast ... Then in the emptiness, I disassembled a letter from one of the ancient alphabets, and I leaned on absence. So who am I after the visitation? A bird, or a passerby amid the symbols and the memory vendors? As if I were an antique piece, as if I were a ghost sneaking in from Yabous, telling myself: Let’s go to the seven hills. Then I placed my mask on a stone, and walked as the sleepless walk, led by my dream. And from one moon to another I leapt. There is enough of unconsciousness to liberate things from their history. And there is enough of history to liberate unconsciousness from its ascension. Take me to our early years—my first girlfriend says. Leave the windows open for the house sparrow to enter your dream—I say ... then I awaken, and no city is in the city. No “here” except “there.” And no there but here. If it weren’t for the mirage I wouldn’t have walked to the seven hills ... if it weren’t for the mirage!

If I were another on the road, I would not have looked back, I would have said what one traveler said to another: Stranger! awaken the guitar more! Delay our tomorrow so our road may extend and space may widen for us, and we may get rescued from our story together: you are so much yourself ... and I am so much other than myself right here before you! If I were another I would have belonged to the road, neither you nor I would return. Awaken the guitar and we might sense the unknown and the route that tempts the traveler to test gravity. I am only my steps, and you are both my compass and my chasm. If I were another on the road, I would have hidden my emotions in the suitcase, so my poem would be of water, diaphanous, white, abstract, and lightweight ... stronger than memory, and weaker than dewdrops, and I would have said: My identity is this expanse! If I were another on the road, I would have said to the guitar: Teach me an extra string! Because the house is farther, and the road to it prettier— that’s what my new song would say. Whenever the road lengthens the meaning renews, and I become two on this road: I ... and another!

I have a seat in the abandoned theater in Beirut. I might forget, and I might recall the final act without longing ... not because of anything other than that the play was not written skillfully ... Chaos as in the war days of those in despair, and an autobiography of the spectators’ impulse. The actors were tearing up their scripts and searching for the author among us, we the witnesses sitting in our seats I tell my neighbor the artist: Don’t draw your weapon, and wait, unless you’re the author! —No Then he asks me: And you are you the author? —No So we sit scared. I say: Be a neutral hero to escape from an obvious fate He says: No hero dies revered in the second scene. I will wait for the rest. Maybe I would revise one of the acts. And maybe I would mend what the iron has done to my brothers So I say: It is you then? He responds: You and I are two masked authors and two masked witnesses I say: How is this my concern? I’m a spectator He says: No spectators at chasm’s door ... and no one is neutral here. And you must choose your part in the end So I say: I’m missing the beginning, what’s the beginning?

The cypress is the tree’s grief and not the tree, and it has no shadow because it is the tree’s shadow —Bassam Hajjar The cypress broke like a minaret, and slept on the road upon its chapped shadow, dark, green, as it has always been. No one got hurt. The vehicles sped over its branches. The dust blew into the windshields ... / The cypress broke, but the pigeon in a neighboring house didn’t change its public nest. And two migrant birds hovered above the hem of the place, and exchanged some symbols. And a woman said to her neighbor: Say, did you see a storm? She said: No, and no bulldozer either ... / And the cypress broke. And those passing by the wreckage said: Maybe it got bored with being neglected, or it grew old with the days, it is long like a giraffe, and little in meaning like a dust broom, and couldn’t shade two lovers. And a boy said: I used to draw it perfectly, its figure was easy to draw. And a girl said: The sky today is incomplete because the cypress broke. And a young man said: But the sky today is complete because the cypress broke. And I said to myself: Neither mystery nor clarity, the cypress broke, and that is all there is to it: the cypress broke!