Mahmoud Darwish

 

Love, like meaning, is out on the open road, but like poetry, it is difficult. It requires talent, endurance, and skillful formulation, because of its many stations. It is not enough to love, for that is one of nature’s magical acts, like rainfall and thunder. It takes you out of yourself into the other’s orbit and then you have to fend for yourself. It is not enough to love, you have to know how to love. Do you know how? You cannot answer, because you cannot relive the ecstasies that shook you and scattered you all over the lilac’s escapade, electrified you and tortured you with the scorching taste of honey. You cannot recall the liveliest and sweetest modes of death; when your “I” left you for your woman, and you encountered your self, fresh as a ripe fruit, in her.

When recalled by words, those moments are impervious to the attempt to raise the body to the station of the soul. Who among us has not said to his woman: “I only exist in you,” and was truthful. We were truthful, as well, when we found our existence in a similar utterance in a different place. So do you know how to love? You cannot answer, perhaps because you did not notice the subtle atmospheric shifts when traveling from pole to pole: love and passion, rapture and infatuation, ardor and affection, fondness and devotion, blazing love and bewildering love, craving and caprice, dalliance and desire, longing and lust, admiration and attraction, and other desires in search of senses. In every station the body has a certain state, and for every state there is a station between death and life. So you never know where or how you are.

excerpt from In the Presence of Absence

Mahmoud Darwish

 The Horse Fell Off the Poem

TRANSLATED BY FADY JOUDAH

The horse fell off the poem

and the Galilean women were wet

with butterflies and dew,

dancing above chrysanthemum

The two absent ones: you and I

you and I are the two absent ones

A pair of white doves

chatting on the branches of a holm oak

No love, but I love ancient

love poems that guard

the sick moon from smoke

I attack and retreat, like the violin in quatrains

I get far from my time when I am near

the topography of place ...

There is no margin in modern language left

to celebrate what we love,

because all that will be ... was

The horse fell bloodied

with my poem

and I fell bloodied

with the horse’s blood ...