Issue 2 Archive

From STATE OF SIEGE

A woman said to a cloud: cover my beloved
Because my clothing is soaked with his blood.
          ***
If you are not rain, my love
Be a tree
Green in its growing season, be a tree
Be a stone
Drenched with the dew, be a stone
If you are not a stone, my love
Be a moon
In your beloved's dream, be a moon
[A woman said this
to her son at his burial]
          ***
Oh sentries! Aren't you weary
Of keeping watch over the light in our salt
And the rose's incandescence in our wounds
Aren't you weary, oh sentries ?
          ***
A bit of this infinite blue
Would be enough
To lighten the load of these times
And to clean the filth of this place
          ***
Let the soul come down from its jewelled frame
And walk beside me on its
Silken feet, hand in hand, like two
Old friends, who share old bread
And the time-honored glass of wine
Let us cross that street together
Later our days will go off in different directions
Mine, beyond all nature, as for the soul
It will choose to squat on a high rock
          ***
The shadows grow green on my ruins
And the wolf slumbers on my goat's skin
He dreams as I do, as the angel does
That life is here… not down there
          ***
Under siege, time becomes space
Petrified in its eternity
Under siege, space becomes time
That missed its yesterday and its tomorrow
          ***
The martyr makes things clear to me: I wasn't seeking, beyond this place
The virgins of immortality, because I love life
On earth, among the pines and the fig-trees
But I can't reach it, so I took aim
With the last thing that belonged to me: the blood in the blue sky's body
          ***
The martyr warns me: Don't believe their ululations
Believe my father when he looks at my photograph weeping
How did you reverse our roles, my son, and precede me?
I should have gone first, I should have gone first!
          ***
The martyr surrounds me: I've merely changed my place and my rude furniture
I've placed a gazelle on my bed
And a crescent moon on my finger
To ease my pain
          ***
The siege goes on in order to convince us to choose an enslavement which will not
Harm us, in total freedom!
          ***
To resist means: to check the well-being of
Your heart and your testicles, and of your persistent illness:
The sickness of hope.
          ***
Hail to whoever who shares my perception
Of the light's drunkenness, the butterfly's light in
This tunnel's darkness.
          ***

Hail to whoever shares my glass with me
In the thickness of a night overflowing our two places
Hail to my own ghost.

— Mahmoud Darwish
Written in Ramallah, January 2002

(Translated by Marilyn Hacker from the French version of Saloua Ben Abda & Hassan Chami in Le Monde Diplomatique, avril 2002)