Mural

by Mahmoud Darwish

  Be like love – a storm among trees

  Don’t stand on the threshold like a beggar or tax collector

  Don’t be an undercover policeman directing traffic

  Be strong like shining steel and take off the fox’s mask

  Be chivalrous glamorous fatal

  Say what you want to say:

  I come from one meaning and go to another

  Life is liquid

  and I thicken it and define it

  with my pair of scales and sceptre

  Death wait

  take a seat

  drink a glass of wine

  and don’t bargain with me

  Someone like you doesn’t bargain with anyone

  and someone like me doesn’t argue with the herald of the invisible

  Take it easy – perhaps you’re worn out by star wars

  Who am I that you should visit me?

  Have you time to check out my poem?

  No that’s not your concern

  your concern is with the clay of man’s being

  not with what he does or says

  You’re defeated Death by the arts by each one of them

  You’re defeated by the songs of the land of two rivers

  By the Egyptian obelisk by the tomb of the Pharaohs

  In the temples there are bas-reliefs who defeated you

  And eternity escaped through your cracks

  So carry on with yourself

  and with us

  as you see fit

  And I want

  I want to live

  I have work to do on the geography of volcanoes

  From desolation to ruin

  from the time of Lott to Hiroshima

  As if I’d never yet lived

  with a lust I’ve still to know

  Perhaps Now has gone further away

  and yesterday come closer

  So I take Now’s hand to walk along the hem of history

  and avoid cyclic time

  with its chaos of mountain goats

  How can my tomorrow be saved?

  By the velocity of electronic time

  or by my desert caravan slowness?

  I have work til my end

  as if I won’t see tomorrow

  and I have work for today who isn’t here

  So I listen

  softly softly

  to the ant beat of my heart. Bear with me my patience

  I hear the cry of the imprisoned stone: let me go

  In a violin I see yearning’s migration between peat and sky

  And in my feminine hand

  I hold tight my familiar eternity:

  I was created then loved then died then awoke on the grass of my tombstone

  whose letters from time to time refer to me

  What’s the use of Spring if it doesn’t please the dead

  and show them the joy of life and the shock of forgetfulness?

  That’s the clue to my poems

  at least the sentimental ones

  And what on earth are dreams if not our only way of speaking?

  Take your time Death

  Take a seat on the crystal of my days

  as if you’ve always been a constant friend

  as if you were the foreigner among living creatures

  You are the exile

  You haven’t a life

  Your life is only my death

  You neither live nor die

  You kidnap children between their thirst for milk and milk

  You’ll never be a child in a cradle rocked by finches

  never will angels and stags tease you with their horns

  as they teased us

  we guests of the butterfly

  You are the miserable exile

  with no woman pressing you to her breasts

  no woman to make during the long night

  nostalgia Two

  in the language of desire

  and to make into One

  the land and heaven which is in us

  No boy of yours to say: Father I love you

  You are the exile

  You king of kings

  There’s no praise for your sceptre

  no falcon waiting on your horse

  no pearls embedded in your crown

  You are stripped of flags and music

  How can you go around like a cowardly thief without guards or singers?

  Who do you think you are?

  You’re the Great Highness of Death

  Mighty leader of the invincible Assyrians

  So do with us

  and yourself

  as you see fit

  And I want I want to live to forget you

  and dismiss our long affair as nothing

  So I can read the letters written by the faraway sky

  Each time I readied myself you failed to show up

  Each time I said Wait! so I may finish the last lap of two bodies becoming one

  You said mockingly: Don’t forget we have an appointment

  When is it?

  Is it at oblivion’s summit

  Where the world gives up and bows down to the temple’s wood and the animals painted in caves?

  Saying: I’m nothing but what I leave behind

  and my only son

  Where is our appointment?

  Permit me to select a café by the door of the sea?

  No

  Don’t come to God’s shore, you son of sinners, son of Adam

  you were born to labour not question

  Be amicable yes you Death amicable

  become abstract so I can grasp the essence of your unfindable wisdom!

  Perhaps you taught Cain to throw too soon?

  Perhaps you should have taught Job more patience?

  Perhaps you saddled your horse Death to take me on my horse?

  As if when I confront forgetfulness my language saves me

  As if I’m eternally present eternally flying

  As if since knowing you my drugged tongue has become addicted to your white chariot

  higher than the clouds of sleep

  higher than when the senses are freed from the burden of matter

  Yet you and I on the road to God are like two Sufis following a vision

  both of us blind

  Retreat under protection and by yourself Death

  For I am free in this here of neither here nor there

  retreat to your lonely exile

  Fetch your hunting gear

  and wait for me by the door of the sea

  Prepare some red wine for my return to the clinic in the land of the sick

  Don’t be crude O sledgehammer of hearts!

  I didn’t come to mock you nor to walk on water in the soul’s north

  But still

  you led me astray

  and I neglected the end of my poem:

  I didn’t carry my mother on my mare to marry my father

  I left the door ajar for an Andalusia of songs

  and sat myself on a fence of almonds and pomegranates

  brushing out cobwebs from my grandfathers’ grandfathers’ clothes

  whilst foreign armies pass by along the ancient road

  punctuating time with the same ancient war machine

  Death is this history your twin or your ravine opposite?

  The dove builds her nest in an iron helmet

  And wormwood may sprout from the wheels of a destroyed chariot

  What does History your twin or opposite do to nature when earth meets heaven and the holy rain rains?

  Death

  wait for me

  at the door to the sea in the café of romantics

  Don’t come back until your arrow misses one last time

  Like this I can say farewell to my inside from my outside

  Like this I can proffer my wheat-filled soul to blackbirds perched on my hand and shoulder

  Like this I can say goodbye to the land that drinks my salt and sows me
as pasture for the horses and gazelles

  Wait whilst I finish my short visit to time and place

  Don’t argue about whether or not I’m coming back

  I’m going to thank life

  while neither living nor dead

  Death the supreme one you’re the orphan!

  My nurse tells me: you were shivering violently and screaming: O heart!

  O heart take me to the toilet …

  What’s the use of my soul if my body’s sick and can’t evacuate?

  O Heart Heart bring back my footsteps so I can go to the toilet alone!

  I’ve forgotten my arms legs two knees

  and how gravity works with an apple

  and how the heart functions

  I’ve forgotten Eve’s garden at the entry to eternity

  I’ve forgotten the use of my small organs

  I’ve forgotten how to breathe with my lungs

  I’ve forgotten speech

  I’m scared for my language

  Leave the rest and just bring back my language!

  My nurse says: you were shivering violently and screaming:

  I don’t want to return to anyone

  I don’t want to return to any land

  After this long absence

  I want only to return to my language deep in the cooing of a dove

  My nurse says you kept shivering and asking me:

  Is death what you’re doing with me right now?

  Or is this how language dies?

  Green the land of my poem is green and high

  Slowly I tell it slowly with the grace of a seagull riding the waves on the book of water

  I bequeath it written down to the one who asks: to whom shall we sing when salt poisons the dew?

  Green I write it on prose of wheat in the book of fields

  stalks bending with our weight

  Whenever I befriended or became a brother to an ear of wheat

  annihilation and its opposite taught me survival

  I am the grain that died and became green again

  there is something of life in death

  I suppose I am I suppose I’m not

  No one died instead of me

  Thanks apart what words do the dead remember:

  God have mercy on our souls

  I enjoy recalling verses I’ve forgotten

  I didn’t engender a son to bear the burden of his father’s death

  I prefer the open marriage of words

  the feminine stumbling on the masculine

  in the ebb of poetry towards prose

  A sycamore will take my limbs as branches

  and my heart will pour its muddy water into a planet

  Who will I be in death after myself?

  Who was I in death before myself?

  A spectre proclaimed

  Osiris was like us

  and the son of Mary was like you

  and like me

  an agony convulses a dying nothingness

  promising that death is temporary

  a trick …

  Frome where does poetry come?

  From the heart’s intelligence

  from a hunch about the unknown

  or from a rose in the desert?

  The personal is not personal

  and the universal not universal

  I suppose I am I suppose I’m not

  The more I listen to my heart the more I’m filled with the words of the unseen

  and lifted high to the treetops

  I fly aimless from dream to dream

  Belonging to a thousand years of poetry

  born in the darkness of white linen

  I don’t know who amongst us was I

  and who the dream

  Am I my dream?

  I suppose I am I suppose I’m not

  My language doesn’t lose its ruminant lilt til it migrates north

  Our dogs quietened

  our goats in the hills lost in mist

  a stray arrow lodges in the face of certitude

  my language on horseback wearies me quibbling about what the past makes of the days of Imru al Qays

  who was caught between poetry and Caesar

  Each time I turn my face to the gods

  there in the land of lavender

  I’m lit by Anat’s round moon

  Anat the mistress so the story goes of metaphor

  She mourns no one

  but weeps for her own attractions:

  Is this magic my own

  or is it offered me by the poet

  who shared the emptiness of my bed of glory?

  and plucked abundant flowers

  from the thicket of my playfulness

  Or by that poet who coaxed night’s milk in my breast?

  I’m the beginning

  I’m the ending

  And my limits outdo my limits

  And my harts run after me in words

  nothing before and nothing after

  I won’t dream of repairing

  the axle of the wind’s chariot

  or of healing the wounds of the soul

  Myths are traps along the course of the real

  and in the poem there’s no room to alter the passing of the past that won’t pass

  or to stop the earthquake

  I will dream in the hope that countries expand to make room for me as I am

  an orphan cut off from the people of this sea

  Stop asking me hard questions

  Who am I you ask

  am I my mother’s son?

  I don’t doubt much

  I can do without shepherds and kings

  My today like my tomorrow is with me

  I have with me a small notebook

  and each time a cloud grazes a bird I write: a dream has freed my wings

  and I am flying too

  Everything that is alive flies

  And I am me

  nothing more

  I’m one of the people of this plain

  When the feast-day for barley arrives

  I’ll visit my magnificent remains

  they’re a tattoo

  the winds can’t preserve or scatter

  And when the feast day for vineyards arrives

  Drink for me a glass of wine from a peddler

  My soul is light

  My body heavy with memory and places

  In spring I’ll become a tourist’s impressions scrawled on a postcard:

  On the left of the deserted stage a lily and a walking shadow

  on the right a modern city

  And I am me

  nothing more

  I’m not a Roman legion guarding the salt roads

  I pay a toll for the salt in my bread

  and I say to history:

  Decorate your lorries with lowly slaves and lowly kings

  and you will pass …

  No one henceforth will say No

  And I am me

  nothing more

  I belong to the people of this night

  and I dream on my horse going up and up

  following the river to its source behind the mountain

  Listen Horse be sure-footed

  for in the wind we can’t be told apart

  You are my youth and I’m your shadow

  Stand firm like Aleph and strike lightening

  Search with your hoof for the pulsating desire there in the echo

  Stand tall like Aleph

  Hold firm and be erect as Aleph

  Don’t fall on the last foothill like an abandoned ensign in the alphabet

  In the wind we can’t be told apart

  You are my cover I’m your metaphor

  To hell with tame processions

  Faster Horse!

  Pull my past into a place that is mine

  for place is the path and there’s no path save you

  shod as you are with the winds

  Make sparks in the mirage!

  Show me clouds in the
nothingness

  be guide and brother to my light

  Don’t die before me or after me on the last foothill

  Don’t die with me

  Warn me of the ambulance

  and the dead

  I may – who knows – still be alive

  I will dream

  Not to change the apparent result

  but to rescue myself from the dry penury of my soul

  I remember by heart all my heart

  who is no longer a fretful child

  one aspirin calms and mollifies him

  my neighbouring heart has become a stranger

  and I’m no longer at the beck of his wishes

  or of his women

  The heart rusts like iron

  It no longer takes

  no longer gives

  no longer feels the first rain of desire

  no more laments like the dry August grass

  my heart is turned into a hermit

  similes no longer speak

  When the heart dries up

  aesthetics become geometric

  feelings wear cloaks

  and virginity becomes cunning

  Each time I turned to face the first songs

  there were tracks of a sand grouse on the words

  I wasn’t the child who happily said: yesterday was better

  But memory’s two light hands can rock and make the earth tremble

  and in an exile’s veins memory can carry the weeping scent of night flowers

  which make him declare:

  Be my grief’s ascent then I’ll find my time …

  Then all I’ll need

  to follow the ancient ships

  will be one beat of a seagull’s wing

  How long ago did we discover Time and Death

  the synonymous twins of life?

  Maybe we’re still alive because death forgot us?

  We with our gift of memory are free

  to walk the green walk of Gilgamesh

  from age to age

  Being is a perfect speck of dust …

  Absence shatters me as if I were a small jug of water

  Enkidu went to sleep and didn’t wake up

  And my wings slept swaddled in a handful of their own clay feathers

  The gods are wind turned to stone

  My left arm a wooden stick

  My heart is abandoned like a dry well

  and the savage echo shouts: Enkidu!

  My imagination will give out before I finish the journey

  I don’t have the energy to make my dream real

  Give me my weapons so I can polish them with the salt of tears

  Give me tears Enkidu

  So the dead in us may weep for the living

  And me?

  Who has gone to sleep now Enkidu?

  Is it me or you?

  Our Gods are a fistful of wind

  So wake me with all the fickleness of your humanity

  And let’s dream that in some slight way the gods and us are equal

  We who restore the beautiful land between the Tigris and Euphrates and cherish its names