M
Muhammad
Guest
This is a poem i translated from Arabic, it was written 5 years ago by Mahmoud Darwish in Ramallah while under the Israeli siege....
~~~~~~~~~
State of Siege
Mahmoud Darwish
Here, near the hillsides, facing the sunset and the hole of time,
Near gardens with broken shadows
We do what the prisoners do
And what the jobless do
We grow hope
Lands preparing for dawn, we grew less intelligent,
Because we are staring at the hour of victory:
No night in our night that shined by a cannon
Our enemies stay awake and our enemies light the light for us
in the darkness of our caves
Here, after the poetry of Job, we did not wait anyone…
This siege will continue until we teach our enemies
models of our ancient poetry
The sky is bulletic in the morning
orange at night. As for hearts;
they remained neutral like the roses on a fence
Here, there is no I
Here, Adam remembers his clay…
He says at the edge of death:
I have no more ways to lose:
Free I am near my freedom. And my tomorrow is in my hand
Shortly I will enter my life
And be born free without parents
And choose for my name azure letters
Under siege, life is time
between remembering its beginning
and forgetting its end
Here, at the hills of smoke, on the stairs of the house,
There’s no time for time
We do like those who are ascending to God:
We forget pain
Pain
Is: when a lady does not hang the clothesline, and be content with the cleanness of this flag
No Homeric echo to anything here
Myths only knock when we need them
No Homeric echo to anything. Here’s a general
searching for a sleeping state
under the ruins of coming troy
The soldiers measure the distance between existence and non existence
with a tank’s binocular…
We measure the distance between our bodies and the shells by the sixth instinct
You who stand at the doorsteps come in,
Drink Arabic coffee with us
You may feel like you are humans like us
You who stand at the doorsteps of houses!
Get out of our mornings,
So that we become assured that we are humans like you!
We find time for fun:
We play dice, or read our news
In the newspapers of the wounded yesterday
And read the fortune: in 2002 the camera smiles for the sign of siege
Whenever yesterday came I tell him:
Our date is not today, go
And come tomorrow!
I think, but there’s no use:
What can someone like me think, there
at the top of the hill, since three thousands years,
and in this passing moment?
This thought hurts
And awakens the memory
When the planes disappear the doves fly,
white white, washing the cheek of the sky
with free wings, regaining the beauty and the ownership
of air and amusement. Higher and higher fly
the doves, white white. If only the sky was
real; a man passing between two bombs said to me
The flash, the insight and the lightning
are in resemblance…
Soon I’ll know if this is the revelation…
Or the close friends will know that the poem
passed, and killed it’s poet
To a critic: don’t interpret my words
with a tea spoon or with birds’ traps!
My words besiege me in my sleep
My words which I didn’t say,
And they write me and then leave me searching for the rest of my sleep
cypresses, behind the soldiers, are minarets protecting
the sky from falling. And behind the iron fence soldiers pissing – under the guard of a tank – and the autumn day continues its golden picnic in
a wide street like the church after the Sunday pray…
We love life tomorrow
When tomorrow comes we will love life
as it is, normal sly
grey or colorful.. No resurrection in it and no hereafter
And if there must be joy
let it be light on the heart and waist
As the practiced believer does not get bitten
from a joy.. twice!
A sarcastic writer said to me:
If I knew the end, from the start;
I wouldn’t have had anything left to do in language
To a killer:
If you have contemplated the victim’s face
and thought it through, you would have remembered your mother in the
gas chamber, you would have been freed from the rifle’s wisdom
and would have changed your mind: this is not the way to find one’s identity
To another killer:
If you have left the fetus for 30 days,
then the possibilities would have changed:
The occupation may end, and the infant may not remember the time of the siege,
and grow up a healthy child,
and study in the same academy with one of your daughters
the ancient history of Asia.
and they may fall in love.
and may have a baby girl (she would be Jewish by birth).
what have you done then?
your daughter have become a widow,
and your grand daughter an orphan?
so what have you done with your scattered family
and how did you shoot three doves with one bullet?
This rhyme was not necessary, not to keep the tune
nor to shorten the pain
it’s extra
like flies at the table
The fog is darkness, darkness that is intensively white
being peeled by the orange and the promising woman.
The siege is the waiting
the waiting on tilted ladder in the middle of the storm
Alone, we are alone until drunkenness
if it wasn’t for the visits of the rainbow
We have brothers behind this expanse.
Good brothers. They love us. They look at us and cry.
Then they say in secret:
If only this siege was here so I .. and they don’t complete the phrase:
don’t leave us alone, don’t leave us.
Our losses: between two and eight martyrs every day.
and ten wounded.
and twenty houses.
and fifty olive trees…
add to that the structural flaw that
will hit the poem, the play and the unfinished painting
In the road that is lightened by an exiled lamp
I see a tent in the blow of directions:
The south is hard for the wind,
And the east is a west that embraced Sufism,
And the west is the truce of killed people coining the coins of peace,
As for the north, the far north
it’s not geography or direction
it’s the council of gods
A woman said to the cloud: cover my beloved
as my clothes are wet with his blood
If you wasn’t rain my love
be tree
saturated with fertility, be tree
And if you wasn’t tree my love
be stone
saturated with humidity, be stone
And if you wasn’t stone my love
be moon
in the sleep of the beloved, be moon
That’s what a woman said
to her son in his funeral
Oh wakeful ones, aren’t you tired yet
of watching the light in our salt
and of the glow of the roses in our wound
aren’t you tired wakeful ones?
We are standing here. Sitting here. Always here. Immortally here.
And we have One purpose One purpose One purpose: To Be.
And after that we are in disagreement about everything:
About the picture of the national flag (you will do well, my alive people, if you choose the symbol of the simple donkey).
And about the words of the new theme
(you will do well if you chose a song about the marriage of doves).
And about the duties of women
(you will do well if you chose a lady for the leadership of the security forces).
And about the percentage, and the public and the private,
About everything. We have one purpose: To Be …
And after that one would find enough time to chose the purpose.
He said to me in his way to his prison:
When I become free I will know that praising the homeland
like defaming the homeland
a career like others!
A little of the blue endless absolute
is enough
to lighten the pressure of this time
and to clean the mud of this place
The soul should dismount
and walk on her silken feet
beside me, and hand in hand, two old friends
sharing the old loaf of bread
and the old cup of wine
to pass this road together
then our days go in two different directions:
Me beyond nature. And she
chose to squat on a high rock
To a poet:
Whenever the absence leaves you
you get involved in the solitude of gods
so be the lost self of your subject
and the subject of yourself. Be present in absence
He finds time for sarcasm:
my phone does not ring
neither does the door bell rings
so how are you sure that
I wasn’t here!
He finds time for the song:
While waiting for you, I can’t wait for you.
I can’t read Dostoyevsky
Neither listen to Um Kulthom or Maria Calas and others.
While waiting for you the pointers in the watch go left…
To a time that has no place.
While waiting for you I did not wait for you, I waited for eternity.
He says to her: what rose do you love
and she says: the carnation.. black
He says: where do you take me, and the carnation is black ?
She says: to the focus of the light inside me
and she says: and further … further … further
This siege will go on until the besieger feel like the besieged,
that boredom
is an attribute of humans.
I do not love you, I do not hate you –
a detained said to the investigator: my heart is full
of what is not your concern. My heart is full with the smell of mariamiah.
My heart is innocent shining full,
And no time in the heart for the test. Yes,
I don’t love you. Who are you to love?
Are you part of me, and a date of tea,
and a sound of flute, and a song to love you?
But I hate detention and don’t hate you
That’s what a detained said to the investigator: my feelings are not your concern.
My feelings are my private night…
My night that moves between the bellows free from the measure and the rhyme!
We sat far from our fates like birds
furnishing their nests in the holes of sculptures,
or in the braziers, or in the tents
that was set up in the prince’s road to the hunting journey…
On my ruins grows the green shadow,
And the wolf sleeps on the hair of my sheep
and dreams like me, and like the angel
that life is here … not there
The myths refuse to change their plot
maybe an incidental flaw hit them
maybe ships stranded to uninhabited land,
so the fictitious was hit by the real,
but they don’t change their plot.
whenever they found a reality that does not suit them
they altered it with a bulldozer.
as truth is the maid of the text, a beauty,
white without flaw…
To a semi orientalist: let it be what you believe.
let’s assume that I’m stupid, stupid, stupid.
and I don’t play golf.
and I don’t understand technology,
and I can’t ride a plane!
Is that why you took my life to make of it yours?
If you weren’t you, and I wasn’t me,
we would be friends admitting their need to stupidity.
But to the stupid, like to the Jewish in The merchant of Venice
there is a heart, and bread, and tearing eyes?
In the siege, time becomes place
stoned in its eternity
In the siege, space becomes time
stayed behind its yesterday and tomorrow
This land is low, high
Or holy, harlot
We don’t care much about the charm of attributes
as the opening, of the sky, may become
geography
The martyr besiege me whenever I lived a new day
and asks me: where were you ? return to the dictionaries all the words that you gave me,
and tone down for the sleepers the ringing of the echo
The martyr teaches me: No aesthetic outside my freedom.
The martyr clarifies for me: I did not search behind the horizon
for the virgins of immortality, as I love life here
on earth, between the pines and the fig trees,
but I could not find a path to it, so I searched
for it with the last thing I have: The blood in the blue sky’s body.
The martyr besiege me: Don’t walk in the funeral
unless you knew me. I don’t want a complement from anybody.
The martyr warns me: Don’t believe their ululations.
Believe my father when he looks at my photo crying:
How did you switch our roles son, and walked before me.
Me first, and me first!
The martyr besiege me: I did not change but my place and poor furniture.
I put a gazelle on my bed,
and a crescent on my finger,
to lighten my pain!
This siege will go on until it convince us of a slavery that does not harm, but in full freedom!!.
To resist means: To make sure of the health
of the heart and the testicles, and of your deep rooted disease:
the disease of hope.
And in what remains of dawn I walk to my outside
and in what remains of night I hear the foot steps inside me.
peace to who shares my attention to
the ecstasy of light, the light of the butterfly, in
the night of this tunnel.
peace to who shares my cup
in the thickness of a night overwhelmed by the two seats
peace to my ghost.
To a reader: Do not trust the poem –
the daughter of absence. It’s not intuition, nor
is it thought, but it’s the sense of the abyss.
If love got sick I heal it
with sport and sarcasm
and by separating the singer from the song
My friends always prepare a goodbye party for me,
and a comfortable tomb shaded by oak trees
and a tombstone from the marble of time
then I always get ahead of them in the funeral:
Who died.. who ?
The siege transforms me from a singer to … a sixth string in the violin!
The martyr daughter of the martyr daughter of the martyr and sister of the martyr
and the sister of the martyr the daughter in law of the mother of the martyr the granddaughter of martyred grandfather
and a neighbor to the uncle of the martyr etc … etc …
And no news item upsets the civilized world,
as the barbaric age is over.
and the victim is unknown, ordinary,
and the victim – like the truth – relative etc … etc
Quiet, quiet, the soldiers want
at this hour to listen to the songs
that the martyrs listened to, and remained like the smell of
coffee in their blood, fresh.
Truce, truce to test the teachings: do planes fix plows?
We said to them: Truce, truce to test the intentions,
as some peace may leak to the spirit.
Then we compete on loving our things in poetic ways.
They answered: Don’t you know that peace with the self
opens the gates of our castle for the musical key of the hijaz or the nahawand?
We said: And what? … and then?
Writing is a little puppy biting nothingness
Writing causes a wound without blood..
Our cups of coffee. And the birds and the green trees
with blue shadow, and the sun jumping from one wall
to another like a gazelle.
And the water in the clouds of endless shapes in what left for us
of sky. And other things with postponed memories
Showing that this morning is strong and beautiful,
and that we are guests of eternity.
~~~~~~~~~
State of Siege
Mahmoud Darwish
Here, near the hillsides, facing the sunset and the hole of time,
Near gardens with broken shadows
We do what the prisoners do
And what the jobless do
We grow hope
Lands preparing for dawn, we grew less intelligent,
Because we are staring at the hour of victory:
No night in our night that shined by a cannon
Our enemies stay awake and our enemies light the light for us
in the darkness of our caves
Here, after the poetry of Job, we did not wait anyone…
This siege will continue until we teach our enemies
models of our ancient poetry
The sky is bulletic in the morning
orange at night. As for hearts;
they remained neutral like the roses on a fence
Here, there is no I
Here, Adam remembers his clay…
He says at the edge of death:
I have no more ways to lose:
Free I am near my freedom. And my tomorrow is in my hand
Shortly I will enter my life
And be born free without parents
And choose for my name azure letters
Under siege, life is time
between remembering its beginning
and forgetting its end
Here, at the hills of smoke, on the stairs of the house,
There’s no time for time
We do like those who are ascending to God:
We forget pain
Pain
Is: when a lady does not hang the clothesline, and be content with the cleanness of this flag
No Homeric echo to anything here
Myths only knock when we need them
No Homeric echo to anything. Here’s a general
searching for a sleeping state
under the ruins of coming troy
The soldiers measure the distance between existence and non existence
with a tank’s binocular…
We measure the distance between our bodies and the shells by the sixth instinct
You who stand at the doorsteps come in,
Drink Arabic coffee with us
You may feel like you are humans like us
You who stand at the doorsteps of houses!
Get out of our mornings,
So that we become assured that we are humans like you!
We find time for fun:
We play dice, or read our news
In the newspapers of the wounded yesterday
And read the fortune: in 2002 the camera smiles for the sign of siege
Whenever yesterday came I tell him:
Our date is not today, go
And come tomorrow!
I think, but there’s no use:
What can someone like me think, there
at the top of the hill, since three thousands years,
and in this passing moment?
This thought hurts
And awakens the memory
When the planes disappear the doves fly,
white white, washing the cheek of the sky
with free wings, regaining the beauty and the ownership
of air and amusement. Higher and higher fly
the doves, white white. If only the sky was
real; a man passing between two bombs said to me
The flash, the insight and the lightning
are in resemblance…
Soon I’ll know if this is the revelation…
Or the close friends will know that the poem
passed, and killed it’s poet
To a critic: don’t interpret my words
with a tea spoon or with birds’ traps!
My words besiege me in my sleep
My words which I didn’t say,
And they write me and then leave me searching for the rest of my sleep
cypresses, behind the soldiers, are minarets protecting
the sky from falling. And behind the iron fence soldiers pissing – under the guard of a tank – and the autumn day continues its golden picnic in
a wide street like the church after the Sunday pray…
We love life tomorrow
When tomorrow comes we will love life
as it is, normal sly
grey or colorful.. No resurrection in it and no hereafter
And if there must be joy
let it be light on the heart and waist
As the practiced believer does not get bitten
from a joy.. twice!
A sarcastic writer said to me:
If I knew the end, from the start;
I wouldn’t have had anything left to do in language
To a killer:
If you have contemplated the victim’s face
and thought it through, you would have remembered your mother in the
gas chamber, you would have been freed from the rifle’s wisdom
and would have changed your mind: this is not the way to find one’s identity
To another killer:
If you have left the fetus for 30 days,
then the possibilities would have changed:
The occupation may end, and the infant may not remember the time of the siege,
and grow up a healthy child,
and study in the same academy with one of your daughters
the ancient history of Asia.
and they may fall in love.
and may have a baby girl (she would be Jewish by birth).
what have you done then?
your daughter have become a widow,
and your grand daughter an orphan?
so what have you done with your scattered family
and how did you shoot three doves with one bullet?
This rhyme was not necessary, not to keep the tune
nor to shorten the pain
it’s extra
like flies at the table
The fog is darkness, darkness that is intensively white
being peeled by the orange and the promising woman.
The siege is the waiting
the waiting on tilted ladder in the middle of the storm
Alone, we are alone until drunkenness
if it wasn’t for the visits of the rainbow
We have brothers behind this expanse.
Good brothers. They love us. They look at us and cry.
Then they say in secret:
If only this siege was here so I .. and they don’t complete the phrase:
don’t leave us alone, don’t leave us.
Our losses: between two and eight martyrs every day.
and ten wounded.
and twenty houses.
and fifty olive trees…
add to that the structural flaw that
will hit the poem, the play and the unfinished painting
In the road that is lightened by an exiled lamp
I see a tent in the blow of directions:
The south is hard for the wind,
And the east is a west that embraced Sufism,
And the west is the truce of killed people coining the coins of peace,
As for the north, the far north
it’s not geography or direction
it’s the council of gods
A woman said to the cloud: cover my beloved
as my clothes are wet with his blood
If you wasn’t rain my love
be tree
saturated with fertility, be tree
And if you wasn’t tree my love
be stone
saturated with humidity, be stone
And if you wasn’t stone my love
be moon
in the sleep of the beloved, be moon
That’s what a woman said
to her son in his funeral
Oh wakeful ones, aren’t you tired yet
of watching the light in our salt
and of the glow of the roses in our wound
aren’t you tired wakeful ones?
We are standing here. Sitting here. Always here. Immortally here.
And we have One purpose One purpose One purpose: To Be.
And after that we are in disagreement about everything:
About the picture of the national flag (you will do well, my alive people, if you choose the symbol of the simple donkey).
And about the words of the new theme
(you will do well if you chose a song about the marriage of doves).
And about the duties of women
(you will do well if you chose a lady for the leadership of the security forces).
And about the percentage, and the public and the private,
About everything. We have one purpose: To Be …
And after that one would find enough time to chose the purpose.
He said to me in his way to his prison:
When I become free I will know that praising the homeland
like defaming the homeland
a career like others!
A little of the blue endless absolute
is enough
to lighten the pressure of this time
and to clean the mud of this place
The soul should dismount
and walk on her silken feet
beside me, and hand in hand, two old friends
sharing the old loaf of bread
and the old cup of wine
to pass this road together
then our days go in two different directions:
Me beyond nature. And she
chose to squat on a high rock
To a poet:
Whenever the absence leaves you
you get involved in the solitude of gods
so be the lost self of your subject
and the subject of yourself. Be present in absence
He finds time for sarcasm:
my phone does not ring
neither does the door bell rings
so how are you sure that
I wasn’t here!
He finds time for the song:
While waiting for you, I can’t wait for you.
I can’t read Dostoyevsky
Neither listen to Um Kulthom or Maria Calas and others.
While waiting for you the pointers in the watch go left…
To a time that has no place.
While waiting for you I did not wait for you, I waited for eternity.
He says to her: what rose do you love
and she says: the carnation.. black
He says: where do you take me, and the carnation is black ?
She says: to the focus of the light inside me
and she says: and further … further … further
This siege will go on until the besieger feel like the besieged,
that boredom
is an attribute of humans.
I do not love you, I do not hate you –
a detained said to the investigator: my heart is full
of what is not your concern. My heart is full with the smell of mariamiah.
My heart is innocent shining full,
And no time in the heart for the test. Yes,
I don’t love you. Who are you to love?
Are you part of me, and a date of tea,
and a sound of flute, and a song to love you?
But I hate detention and don’t hate you
That’s what a detained said to the investigator: my feelings are not your concern.
My feelings are my private night…
My night that moves between the bellows free from the measure and the rhyme!
We sat far from our fates like birds
furnishing their nests in the holes of sculptures,
or in the braziers, or in the tents
that was set up in the prince’s road to the hunting journey…
On my ruins grows the green shadow,
And the wolf sleeps on the hair of my sheep
and dreams like me, and like the angel
that life is here … not there
The myths refuse to change their plot
maybe an incidental flaw hit them
maybe ships stranded to uninhabited land,
so the fictitious was hit by the real,
but they don’t change their plot.
whenever they found a reality that does not suit them
they altered it with a bulldozer.
as truth is the maid of the text, a beauty,
white without flaw…
To a semi orientalist: let it be what you believe.
let’s assume that I’m stupid, stupid, stupid.
and I don’t play golf.
and I don’t understand technology,
and I can’t ride a plane!
Is that why you took my life to make of it yours?
If you weren’t you, and I wasn’t me,
we would be friends admitting their need to stupidity.
But to the stupid, like to the Jewish in The merchant of Venice
there is a heart, and bread, and tearing eyes?
In the siege, time becomes place
stoned in its eternity
In the siege, space becomes time
stayed behind its yesterday and tomorrow
This land is low, high
Or holy, harlot
We don’t care much about the charm of attributes
as the opening, of the sky, may become
geography
The martyr besiege me whenever I lived a new day
and asks me: where were you ? return to the dictionaries all the words that you gave me,
and tone down for the sleepers the ringing of the echo
The martyr teaches me: No aesthetic outside my freedom.
The martyr clarifies for me: I did not search behind the horizon
for the virgins of immortality, as I love life here
on earth, between the pines and the fig trees,
but I could not find a path to it, so I searched
for it with the last thing I have: The blood in the blue sky’s body.
The martyr besiege me: Don’t walk in the funeral
unless you knew me. I don’t want a complement from anybody.
The martyr warns me: Don’t believe their ululations.
Believe my father when he looks at my photo crying:
How did you switch our roles son, and walked before me.
Me first, and me first!
The martyr besiege me: I did not change but my place and poor furniture.
I put a gazelle on my bed,
and a crescent on my finger,
to lighten my pain!
This siege will go on until it convince us of a slavery that does not harm, but in full freedom!!.
To resist means: To make sure of the health
of the heart and the testicles, and of your deep rooted disease:
the disease of hope.
And in what remains of dawn I walk to my outside
and in what remains of night I hear the foot steps inside me.
peace to who shares my attention to
the ecstasy of light, the light of the butterfly, in
the night of this tunnel.
peace to who shares my cup
in the thickness of a night overwhelmed by the two seats
peace to my ghost.
To a reader: Do not trust the poem –
the daughter of absence. It’s not intuition, nor
is it thought, but it’s the sense of the abyss.
If love got sick I heal it
with sport and sarcasm
and by separating the singer from the song
My friends always prepare a goodbye party for me,
and a comfortable tomb shaded by oak trees
and a tombstone from the marble of time
then I always get ahead of them in the funeral:
Who died.. who ?
The siege transforms me from a singer to … a sixth string in the violin!
The martyr daughter of the martyr daughter of the martyr and sister of the martyr
and the sister of the martyr the daughter in law of the mother of the martyr the granddaughter of martyred grandfather
and a neighbor to the uncle of the martyr etc … etc …
And no news item upsets the civilized world,
as the barbaric age is over.
and the victim is unknown, ordinary,
and the victim – like the truth – relative etc … etc
Quiet, quiet, the soldiers want
at this hour to listen to the songs
that the martyrs listened to, and remained like the smell of
coffee in their blood, fresh.
Truce, truce to test the teachings: do planes fix plows?
We said to them: Truce, truce to test the intentions,
as some peace may leak to the spirit.
Then we compete on loving our things in poetic ways.
They answered: Don’t you know that peace with the self
opens the gates of our castle for the musical key of the hijaz or the nahawand?
We said: And what? … and then?
Writing is a little puppy biting nothingness
Writing causes a wound without blood..
Our cups of coffee. And the birds and the green trees
with blue shadow, and the sun jumping from one wall
to another like a gazelle.
And the water in the clouds of endless shapes in what left for us
of sky. And other things with postponed memories
Showing that this morning is strong and beautiful,
and that we are guests of eternity.
