Mahmoud Darwish, State of Siege

by Vertebrata

Here on a hill slope facing the sunset and the wide-gaping
gun barrel of time
near orchards of severed shadows
we do as prisoners and the unemployed do:
we nurse hope.

~

Ever since those verses penned by Job,
we wait here for no one.

The “I” no longer exists here
and Adam remembers his primordial clay.

This siege won’t end until we teach our enemies
a few odes from our pre-Islamic days.

~

There are no echoes from Homer here.
When myths are needed they simply knock on our doors.
No Homeric echoes for anything…
only a General digging up a comatose state
under the ruins of an encroaching Troy.

~

To measure the distance between being and nothingness,
soldiers use the scopes mounted on their tanks.

We use our sixth sense to measure the distance
between our bodies and flying shells.

~

You, standing at our thresholds, come in,
sip some Arab coffee with us!
You may feel you’re as human as we are.

You! At the thresholds of our houses,
vacate our mornings,
so we may be certain
we’re as human as you are.

~

We have a little time for recreation – we play dice, read our news
in the papers of yesterday’s hemorrhages.
In our horoscopes we read that in the year 2002
the camera will smile for people born
under the Zodiac Sign of the Siege.

~

Every death,
even the most expected one,
is the very first death.
So why do I find
a moon
sleeping under every stone?

~

I ponder in vain:
what can someone, standing
on the top of a hill for three thousand years,
just like me,
be thinking?
What thoughts can be passing through his mind
right now?
This speculation pains me
and reawakens my memory.

~

When warplanes leave the sky
white doves take flight
to scrub the blue with their free wings,
restoring its magnificent sheen and their sovereignty over
open space and play, their white wings
soaring higher and higher.
“Ah, If only the sky were real!” said one man
slithering in between two bombs.

~

We love to live tomorrow.
But when tomorrow comes we’ll love life just as it is,
normal and wily, gray and multi-colored,
with no apocalypse and no doomsday.
And if there be joy, let it be light on our hearts and midriffs!
“A true believer is not stung twice
by the same… joy.”

~

To a killer:
if you had looked into the face of your victim
and thought carefully,
you might have remembered your mother in the Gas Chamber,
and freed yourself from the rifle’s prejudice
and changed your mind.
Come now, this is no way to restore an identity!

~

Sure, we’re head over heel in loneliness
without the occasional visitation of rainbows.

Do we hurt anyone or harm any country
if once in a while we’re spattered from a distance
by a light drizzle of joy?

The siege is a waiting game,
time held suspended on a ladder
leaning into the eye of a storm.

~

In my solitude, I scream out loud –
not to wake everybody from their deep sleep,
but to shake myself from my own captive imagination!

~

We store our misery in jars hidden away from
soldiers who fancy the siege a cause for celebration…
We store our misery for future seasons
as mementos
in case something takes us by surprise in the streets.
Only when life gets back to normal again
can we grieve like everyone else over personal matters
now pushed to the back pages so we’ll
forget our minor wounds.
Tomorrow we’ll feel the side effects
when this place gets its health back.

~

“Wait for me at the edge of the abyss,” he says to her.
“No, come on! I am the abyss,” she says.

A woman said to a cloud: “Cover my beloved –
my clothes are soaked in his blood.”

~

The present tense squeezes all limits to the utmost
busying itself beyond the end…

~

On his way to prison, he told me:
“When I get out, I’ll know for sure
that a eulogy for the homeland and satirical poetry
are the same thing –
a business just like any other business.”

~

With a country on the verge of dawn.
Saddle up your horse, ride it with ease
and keep ahead of your dream.
Then when heaven betrays you
sit down on a rock that breathes a long sigh of grief.

~

How can I bear her brunt? How can she tolerate me?
Since I am her slave, how can I become her master?
How can I free my freedom
without being split in two?

~

This siege will not end until
the hands of physicians and priests
prune our trees.

This siege, my metaphorical siege, will not end
until I teach myself the asceticism of meditation.
Before my self – a lily of the valley wept.
After my self – a lily of the valley wept.
Place is gazing intently at the absurdity of Time.

~

To a poet:
Every time you shun absence,
you grow morose in the isolation of the gods.
Be the wandering “essence” of your subject
and the “subject” of your essence.
Be present in absence!

~

To poetry:
Lay siege to your siege!

To prose:
Find arguments
from the Dictionary of Jurisprudence
and apply them to a reality destroyed by arguments –
then explain your dust.

To poetry and prose:
Fly together like the wings of swallows
that carry the blessed Spring

~

After I wrote twenty lines about love
it seemed to me
the siege had been beaten back
by at least twenty meters.

~

He still finds time for irony:
“My phone never rings,
my doorbell never rings,
so how could she be so sure
I wasn’t home!”

~

To a reader:
Don’t trust the poem, that daughter of the unseen –
it’s neither intuition nor thought,
but a preview of the abyss.

Writing is a puppy snapping at nothingness,
composing bloodless wounds.

~

Peace, the longing of two hardened enemies
to yawn spontaneously on the sidewalks of boredom.

Peace, the sigh of two lovers bathing in moonlight.

~

Peace, when the stronger apologizes to the weaker,
who are weaker only in weaponry,
though theirs is the endless horizon.

Peace, the victory of natural beauty over swords –
iron shattered by dewdrops.

~

Peace, a well-behaved, gently moving day
antagonizing no one.

Peace, a train where two-way passengers team up together
as they picnic on the outer rims of eternity.