Mural

by Mahmoud Darwish

  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

  he’d have smashed the mirror

  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.