mahmud darwish
Alone, we are alone as far down as the sediment/ Were it not for the visits of the rainbows … MD
We have passed yet another anniversary marker of the beginning of my country's occupation of Iraq and while I do enjoy many of the poems I discover in Poets Against War, I have been feeling a bit … blue … of late when I consider the state of the world we have created. One of my favorite sources of news, The Onion, wrote this tongue in cheek a while back, Bush Announces Iraq Exit Strategy: 'We'll Go Through Iran,' but irony is always out to get you and what was a joke yesterday has a way of becoming reality today.
So what better way to perk up and get some hope in this world than discovering a new thinker who introduces you to a brand new world?
I am always delighted when I find a poet who also excels as a wonderful essayist and Lyle Daggett is such a person. In her latest post, and did you touch the dream, she introduced me to a Palestinian poet of fabulous, compassionate possibilities I had never heard of before, Mahmud Darwish.
She begins, simply, with the following:
… I don't have the depth of knowledge to talk intelligently about Mahmoud Darwish's place in the many vast and stunning literary traditions that have woven through Arabic literature over the centuries. Clearly we live, the billions of us each one a perceptive and active being, together in this world, and we must work together, by whatever means are necessary, to make it a world where we acknowledge each other's right to be here. Easy enough said, on the long road of brilliance and ashes that has brought us here so far.
We have a single dream: for the wind to pass,
a friend, and spread the scent of Arabic coffee
over the hills that surround summer and the strangers……
How many prophets does the city need to preserve its father's
name and regret: "I fell without a fight?"
How many skies, in every people, must a city leave behind
for it to love its own crimson shawl? Oh dream…
Don't stare at us like that!
Don't be the last martyr!(From the poem "The Tatar's Swallows," in Why Did You Leave the Horse Alone?)
Darwish's poetry reminds me of Aharon Shabtai's and Wislawa Szymborska's with its hatred of injustice and war but love of the divine in us all, a love for simply loving, a kindness not found in so much writing. Wanting to find more I have been reading and re-reading Darwish’s amazing Under Siege. It is epic; mind-blowing. Here are three small stanzas (including the last) as a sample. I encourage everyone to read the poem in its full:
[To a killer] If you had contemplated the victim’s face
And thought it through, you would have remembered your mother in the
Gas chamber, you would have been freed from the reason for the rifle
And you would have changed your mind: this is not the way
to find one’s identity again.***
A woman told the cloud: cover my beloved
For my clothing is drenched with his blood.***
Our cups of coffee. Birds green trees
In the blue shade, the sun gambols from one wall
To another like a gazelle
The water in the clouds has the unlimited shape of what is left to us
Of the sky. And other things of suspended memories
Reveal that this morning is powerful and splendid,
And that we are the guests of eternity.(from Under Siege; translated by Marjolijn De Jager)
So I must thank Lynn for opening my world up to Mahmoud Darwish. In a letter I sent her I wrote:
… [I] wonder what my life must have been like an hour ago when I had never heard of this poem since everything now is changed. I think when a poet (and joy of joys a single poem!) changes you forever then that is probably one of the highest marks we can give poetry. So I do not ask this as a rhetorical question but in all seriousness; how can I not weep in amazement when I read this poem?
Indeed, how can I not?