Nurturing hope

In January 2002 as Israeli forces laid siege to Yasser Arafat's compound in Ramallah, the Palestinian poet , based in Ramallah at the time, began writing his long poem "State of Siege," which later in the year appeared in book form. Today, as the brutal Israeli war on Gaza enters its second week, killing hundreds of innocent Palestinians and injuring thousands more, we intend to do what Darwish in his poem said that every Palestinian would then continue doing: "We nurture hope." Though Darwish died in 2008 and was mourned across the Arab world, his voice lives on, not least in this poem. The translation reproduced below first appeared in Al-Ahram Weekly in April 2002 by special permission of the author. It is based on extracts from the longer work made by Darwish himself that first appeared in his periodical Al-Karmel.
State of Siege
By
Here on the slopes before sunset/
And at the gun-mouth of time,/
Near orchards deprived of their shadows,/
We do what prisoners do,/
What the unemployed do:/
We nurture hope./
***
A country on the verge of dawn./
We have become less intelligent,/
Because we stare at the hour of victory:/
There is no night in our night that shines with artillery./
Our enemies stay up at night,/
And light/
The darkness of our cellars./
***
Here, after Job's poetry we waited for none.../
***
Here -- There is no "I" --/
Here Adam remembers his clay./
This siege will last until our enemies have been taught/
Some of our jahili poetry./
***
The sky, pencil-grey at mid-morning,/
Is orange at night. As for the hearts/
They remain neutral, like roses on a fence./
***
Under siege, life becomes time/
Between remembering its beginning/
And forgetting its end.../
[...]
At the edge of death, he says:/
No place remains in me for loss,/
Free, I am near my freedom./
My tomorrow is in my hand.../
Soon I will enter life,/
And be born free, parentless,/
And choose letters of azure for my name.../
***
Here, on the heights of smoke, on the stairs of home,/
There is no time for time,/
We do what those who ascend to God do:/
We forget pain./
***
Here, there are no Homeric echoes for anything./
Mythologies knock on our doors when we need them;/
No Homeric echo for anything:/
Here a General excavates a sleeping state/
Under the rubble of a future Troy./
***
Soldiers measure the gap between being/
And nothingness/
Using a tank's gun-sights.../
***
We measure the distance between our bodies/
And the shells with a sixth sense./
***
You, standing on the doorsteps, enter/
And drink Arab coffee with us;/
[Perhaps you feel you are human, like us]/
You, standing on the doorsteps of our homes,/
Get out of our mornings,/
We need to feel comforted that we are/
Human beings, like you!/
***
We find time for entertainment:/
We play backgammon, or leaf through our news/
In the papers of a wounded yesterday,/
We read the horoscopes:
In the year/
2002 the camera will smile/
For those born under the sign of siege./
***
Whenever yesterday visits me, I tell him:/
We won't meet today, Go/
And come tomorrow!/
[...]
To no avail I think:/
What did He, who was like me, think, there,/
On top of the hill three thousand years ago,/
And at this passing moment?/
The thought hurts me/
And my memory is refreshed./
***
When the airplanes disappear the doves fly,/
White, white; they wash the cheeks of the sky/
With their free wings, regaining the glory and monopoly/
Of the air and of playing. Higher and higher,/
The doves fly, white, white. Would that the sky/
Were real. [A man, passing between two bombs, told me]/
***
Glimmer, insight, and lightning/
Could look the same.../
In a little while I'll know if this was/
Revelation.../
Otherwise, close friends will know/
That the poem passed,/
Killing the poet./
***
[To a critic:] Do not interpret my words/
Using a teaspoon, or a trap for a bird!/
My words besiege me in my sleep,/
Words of mine that have not been said, They write me, then leave me,/
Looking for the remains of my sleep.../
***
Cypress trees, behind the soldiers, are minarets/
Protecting the sky from slipping. And behind the iron fence/
Soldiers urinate -- sheltered by a tank --/
As an autumnal day continues its golden stroll/
In a street wide as a church/
After Sunday prayer.../
[...]
We'll love life tomorrow/
When tomorrow arrives, we shall love life/
As it is, ordinary, sly/
Grey or coloured,/
No resurrection, no afterlife./
And if there must be joy,/
Let it be/
Light on the heart and on the waist!/
"A practiced believer is not bitten/
By joy... twice!"/
[...]
Fog is darkness, densely white darkness/
Peeled off by the orange, and a promising woman./
***
Alone, we are alone till the bitter end,/
Except for the visits of the rainbow./
***
Siege is: waiting,/
Waiting on a leaning ladder in the middle of the storm./
***
We have brothers beyond the distance./
Kind brothers, they love us, they look at us,/
They cry, then whisper:/
"Would that the siege were..."/
Not finishing the sentence:/
"Do not leave us alone. Do not leave us."/
[...]
Our losses: between two and eight martyrs/
Every day,/
Ten wounded,/
Twenty houses,/
And fifty olive trees.../
In addition to the structural damage that/
Ruins poems, plays and incomplete paintings./
[...]
On the road to exilelit by a lantern,/
I see a tent torn by the four winds:/
The south is resilient before the wind,/
The east is a west become mystical,/
The west is a truce of the dead minting the currency of peace,/
As for the north, the far north/
This is neither geography nor direction/
It is a pantheon./
[...]
A woman told the cloud: cover my loved one/
My clothes are wet with his blood./
[...]
If you do not become rain, my love/
Become trees/
Saturated with fertility, become trees/
If you do not become trees, my love,/
Become a stone/
Saturated with humidity, become a stone/
If you do not become a stone, my love,/
Become a moon/
In your lover's dream, become a moon./
[Thus a woman spoke/
To her son at his funeral]/
[...]
You, staying up late! Aren't you tired/
Of watching the light of our salt,/
The glow of roses in our wounds/
Aren't you tired you staying up late?/
***
Standing here. Sitting here. Always here./
Eternally here. And we have one single goal:/
To be./
`
After that we differ on everything:/
On the shape of the flag/
[My living people, you would do well/
to choose the simple symbol of a donkey];/
On the words of the new anthem/
[You would do well to choose a song on the mating of doves];/
On the duties of women/
[You would do well to choose a woman to head the security apparatus]./
We differ on percentages, on public and private,/
We differ on everything. We have one goal:/
To be.../
And after that each finds space to choose a goal./
[...]
He told me on his way to prison:/
When I'm set free, I shall know that praising the homeland,/
Like mocking it,/
Is an occupation like any other!/
[...]
A little boundless, absolute blue/
Is enough/
To ease the burden of this time/
And clean the intensity of this place./
[...]
My soul should dismount/
Walk on its silky feet/
By my side, hand in hand, like two old friends,/
Sharing the old loaf of bread/
And the old glass of wine/
Let us walk this road together/
Then our days can go in different directions:/
Me to the metaphysical. As for my soul,/
It can squat on a high rock/
***
[To a poet:] Whenever you feel absence becoming more absent/
You slip into an isolation akin to that of the gods/
So be the wandering "subject" of your object/
And the "object" of your subject./
Be present in absence/
[...]
He finds time for irony:/
My phone does not ring/
Neither does the door bell/
So what made me sure/
That I wasn't here!/
***
He finds time for a song:/
In waiting for you, I cannot wait for you./
I cannot read Dostoyevski/
Or listen to Umm Kulthoum, or Maria Calas,/
Or any one else. In waiting for you, the hands of the watch move/
To the left, to a time/
Without place./
In waiting for you, I did not wait for you. I waited for eternity./
***
He asks her: What flowers do you like?/
She says: Carnations... black/
He says: Where are you taking me,/
When carnations are black?/
She says: to the centre of light within me/
And she says: And further... further... further./
[...]
I do not love you, I do not hate you --/
Said a detainee to the interrogator: My heart is full/
Of what does not concern you./
My heart is flooded with the scent of sage,/
My heart is innocent, radiant, full,/
There is no time in my heart for a test./
Yes, I do not love you. Who are you that I should love you?/
Are you a sigh, a tea date,/
The huskiness of the nay, a song, that I might love you?/
I hate detention, and I do not hate you./
Thus spoke the detainee to the interrogator: My emotions/
Do not concern you. My emotions are my private night.../
My night that moves between pillows free/
Of metre and rhyme!
[...]
We sat far from our destinies, like birds/
Building their nests in the curves of statues,/
Or in chimneys,/
Or in the tents set up/
On a prince's road to a hunt...
[...]
On my ruins the shadow sprouts green,/
And the wolf dozes on my ewe's fleece,/
Dreaming, like me,/
Like an angel/
That life is here/
Not there.../
***
Myths refuse to adapt in plot/
They might be temporarily flawed/
Ships might drift towards land,/
Uninhabited land,/
And thus the imaginary is infected by the real,/
But they never change in plot./
Whenever they find reality unfitting/
They change it with a bulldozer./
Truth is the slave girl of the text -- beautiful,/
White, untarnished.../
[...]
[To a semi-orientalist:] Let it be,/
Let us assume that I am an idiot, an idiot, an idiot,/
That I do not play golf,/
That I do not understand technology,/
And that I cannot fly a plane./
Is this why you took my life to make your life?/
If you were another, if I were another,/
We would have been friends confessing our need for idiocy./
Hath not an idiot --/
Like the Jew in The Merchant of Venice--/
A heart, bread, and eyes that fill with tears?/
***
Under siege, time becomes place,/
Fossilised in its eternity/
Under siege, place becomes time/
Lagging behind/
[...]
The martyr besieges me when I live a new day/
He asks me: Where have you been?/
Give back to the dictionaries all the words/
You once bestowed on me/
Relieve the sleepers from the buzzing echo./
***
The martyr explains: I have not searched beyond the distance/
For eternity's virgins, I love life/
On Earth, among the pines and figs,/
But I had no access to it./
I've searched for it, using every last thing I own:/
Blood in a body of azure./
***
The martyr teaches me: There are no aesthetics outside my freedom./
***
The martyr warns me: Do not believe their ululations/
Believe my father when he looks at my picture, crying:/
Why did you change turns, my son,/
Walking on ahead of me?/
Me first,/
And me first!/
***
The martyr besieges me: I've changed nothing save my position/
And my poor furniture,/
I've placed a gazelle on my bed/
And a half moon on my finger,/
To ease the pain!/
***
The martyr besieges me: Do not walk at my funeral/
Unless you knew me./
I don't want compliments from anyone./
***
This siege will tighten/
Until we're persuaded/
To choose harmless slavery,/
In complete freedom!/
***
To resist means: To be confident/
Of the health of the heart and of the testicles,/
To be confident of your chronic malady:/
The malady of hope./
***
And in what remains of the dawn I walk outside myself;/
And in what remains of the night I hear the echoes of footsteps within me./
***
If love is sick, one treats it/
With exercise and irony/
And with separating the singer from the song/
***
The siege transforms me from a singer into/
A sixth string on a violin./
***
[To a reader:] Do not trust the poem -- The daughter of absence./
The poem is not intuition,/
Nor thought/
It is the abyss sense./
***
Writing is a small puppy biting nothingness/
Writing wounds without blood/
***
My friends are constantly preparing my farewell party,/
Preparing a comfortable grave for me in the shadow of oak trees/
Preparing a gravestone of the marble of time/
But I would always precede them to the funeral:/
Who died... who?/
***
The woman martyr, the daughter of a woman martyr, the daughter of a martyr,/
Sister of a martyr, the sister of a woman martyr, the daughter-in-law/
Of a martyr's mother, the granddaughter of a martyred grandfather,/
And the neighbour of a martyr's uncle [etc.. etc..]/
But this news does not disturb the civilised world,/
For the barbaric age is over,/
And the victim is anonymous, common,/
And the victim -- like truth -- is relative,/
[etc... etc]/
***
Quiet, quiet, for the soldiers now want/
To listen to the songs/
The martyrs listened to, and which remained,/
Like the aroma of coffee in their blood, fresh./
***
A truce, a truce to examine the teachings:/
Can airplanes be used as ploughs?/
We told them: A truce, a truce to examine intentions,/
Perhaps a bit of peace might seep into the soul./
At that point we compete to love our belongings/
Through poetic means./
They answered: Don't you know that peace with oneself/
Opens the doors of our fortress/
To hijaz and nahawand music?/
We said: What then? What next?/
***
Cups of our coffee. The birds. The green trees With blue shadow. The sun leaping from/
One wall to another, like a gazelle.../
The water in the endless shapeless clouds/
In what remains for us of the sky,/
And other things, their memories postponed,/
Prove that this morning is strong and glorious,/
And that we are the guests of eternity./
[...]
Peace be upon him who shares my alertness at/
The ecstasy of the light, the light of butterflies in/
The darkness of this tunnel./
***
Peace be upon him who shares my cup/
In the darkness of a night spilling over the two seats:/
Peace be upon my ghost./
[...]
Translated by Amina Elbendary