 I come from there |  |
I come from there and I have memories
Born as mortals are, I have a mother
And a house with many windows,
I have brothers, friends,
And a prison cell with a cold window.
The wave is mine, snatched by sea-gulls,
I have a view of my own,
And an extra blade of grass.
Mine is the moon at the far edge of words,
Mine the bounty of birds,
And the immortal olive tree.
I walked this land before the swords
Turned its living body into a laden table.
I come from there. I render the sky unto her mother
When the sky weeps for her mother.
And I weep to make myself known
To a returning cloud.
I learnt all the words worthy of the blood-court,
So that I could break the rules.
I learnt all the words and broke them up
To make a single word: Homeland.....
Mahmoud Darwish
(1942-2008)
Palestinian poet
Photograph: Jamal Nasralla, EPA
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| My Heart |  |
My lips mutter: Palestine! Do not die on me!
My heart's with each syringe in your hand, Moustafa Barghouti!
It's with the Muqata'a, with the roadside corpse that help couldn't reach -
With the pencil on your table, Mahmoud Darwish.
With the empty oxygen tanks at the clinic in Nablus.
Maha Abu Shareef, the soldiers who stormed into your house
pissed on the walls of my heart as well.
And now, for the wheels of a Red Crescent ambulance, that heart has become a footstool,
and for you too, Manaal Sufyaan, at Ayn Masbach,
lying in a pool of blood, shot by thugs on your porch.
Our country, a new birth is underway in Bethlehem -
the bloody placenta will be tossed into a pail, and from the womb
a creature born of our peoples' love will burst forth into the blue.
Listen, his heart is beating through mine - I am a Palestinian Jew.
Aharon Shabtai
b. 1939
Israeli poet
translated from the Hebrew by Peter Cole
from: J'accuse- PEN Award for Poetry in Translation, 2004. |
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