Mahmud Darwish

[Gość: poezja]

State of siege
MAHMOUD DARWISH

Here on the hillsides, gazing into the dusk and the canon of time,
Near the shadow-crossed gardens,
We do what prisoners
And the jobless always do,
We try to conjure up hope.

A country preparing for daybreak. Our good sense begins to desert us
For we are intent on victory:
Lit up by shell-fire our night is no night.
Our enemies do not sleep - they light up
The darkness of our cellars.

Nothing of the "self" here.
Adam recalls the dust from which he came.

Close to death, he says:
There is nothing left of me to lose:
Free, I am about to gain my freedom. My future lies in my own hands.
Soon I shall burst into my life,
I shall be born free, parentless,
And I shall chose a name in letters the colour of the sky …

You who stand upon the threshold, come,
Drink Arab coffee with us.
You will realise that you are men like us.
You who stand upon the threshold,
Go from our mornings,
We shall then be reassured that we are
Men like you!

When the planes disappear, the doves take flight,
Brilliant white, they brush the cheek of the sky,
Flying free, they repossess the lustre of
The ether and the play. Higher and higher
The white doves soar. If only the heavens
Were real (said a passer-by in the interval between two bombs).

Cypresses behind the soldiers, minarets shore up
The heavens. Behind the iron hedge
Soldiers piss - sheltered by a tank -
And the autumn day ends its golden stroll
In a street deserted as a church after Sunday mass …

(To a killer) If you had looked your victim in the face
And thought a moment, you would have remembered you mother in the
Gas chamber, you would have rejected the rule of the gun
And changed your mind: that is not the way to recreate an identity.

Through the siege, we wait,
Wait on a ladder pitched in the eye of the storm.

Alone, we would be utterly alone
Were it not for the passing rainbows.

We have brothers over there.
Our brothers are good. They love us. They look at us and weep.
Then they whisper:
"If only the siege were declared …". They leave the sentence unfinished:
"Do not leave us alone; do not abandon us."

Our losses: between two and eight martyrs a day.
And ten wounded.
And twenty homes.
And fifty olive trees …
And the damage to the
Poem, the play and the unfinished canvas.

A woman said to a cloud: cover my loved one
For my clothes are soaked in his blood.

If you are not rainfall, my love
Be a tree
Brimming with fertility, be a tree,
If you are not a tree, my love
Be a stone
Brimming with water, be a stone,
If you are not a stone, my love
Be the moon
In the dream of your loved one, be the moon
(The words of a mother
to her son, as she buried him).

O night watchmen! Aren't you weary
Of watching for the light on our salt
And the incandescent rose of our wounds.
Aren't you weary, o watchmen?

A touch of that absolute blue infinity
Would be enough
To lighten the burden of the times
And wash away the mire.

Time my soul slipped its harness
And walked silk-shod
Beside me, hand in hand, like two
Old friends, breaking bread
And drinking old wine
Let us travel this road together
Then go our separate ways:
I shall journey beyond nature, while
My soul will choose to sit at ease upon a towering rock.

The shadow looms green over what remains of me,
And the wolf drowses on my goat's skin
Like me, like the angel,
He dreams that life is here … not over there.

In the state of siege, time becomes space
Petrified in its eternity
In the state of siege, space becomes time
Robbed of its yesterdays and tomorrows.

The martyr encircles me each day as I awake
And asks me: Where were you? Send back to the dictionaries
All the words you spoke to mev And protect the sleepers from the throbbing
echo.

The martyr tells me: I was not seeking to join
The virgins of immortality, for I love life
On earth, among the pines and the fig trees,
But that is barred to me, so I targeted it
With my ultimate resource: my blood in the azure of eternity.

The martyr warns me: Do not heed the women's cries,
Believe my father when he gazes on my photograph and weeps
How you have changed our roles, my son, and gone before me.
Me first, me first!

The martyr encircles me: I have changed only my place and my crude surroundings.
I have put a gazelle on my bed,
And a crescent moon on my finger,
To ease my pain.

The siege will continue, to persuade us to opt for a form of enslavement
That does no harm, in absolute freedom!!

To resist means: be sure your
Heart and balls are strong, and that your sickness has no cure:
Your hope-sickness.

In what remains of the dawn, I move outside myself
In what remains of the night, I hear the sound of footsteps within.

I greet those who, like me, observe
The drunken light, the butterfly light, in
The darkness of this tunnel.

I greet those who share my glass with me
In the depths of a night that overflows each side:
I greet my own shade.

My friends always prepare a farewell celebration for me,
A peaceful burial place under the shady oaks
A epitaph in the marble of time
Yet, at funerals, I am always a step ahead
Who is dead … who?

The written word, a pup that snaps at the air
The written word wounds without a trace of blood.

Our cups of coffee. The birds, the leafy trees
In the blue shadow, the sun leaps, gazelle-like, from one wall
To the other
The protean rainclouds in our remnant of sky.
And other things that hold memories for us
Reveal this morning is mighty, magnificent
And we are the guests of eternity.


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State of siege, from which these unpublished extracts are taken, was written by
the Palestinian poet in Ramallah in January 2002.