Mahmoud Darwish

Translated, from the Arabic, by Munir Akash and Carolyn Forche

We Have the Right to Love Autumn

And we, too, have the right to love the last days of autumn and ask the grove:
Is there room now for a new autumn, so we may lie down like coals?
Like gold, autumn brings its leaves to half-staff.
If only we never said goodbye to the fundamentals
and questioned our fathers when they fled at knife-point.
	May poetry and God's name have mercy on us!
We have the right to warm the nights of beautiful women, and talk about
what might shorten the night of two strangers waiting for North on the compass.
It's autumn. We have the right to smell autumn's fragrances
	and ask the night for a dream.
Does the dream, like the dreamers themselves, sicken? Autumn. Autumn.
Can a people be born on a guillotine?
We have the right to die any way we wish.
May the earth hide itself away in a blade of wheat!

Other Berbers Will Come

Other Berbers will come. The emperor's wife will be abducted. Drums will beat loudly.
Drums will beat so that horses will leap over human bodies from the Aegean Sea to the Dardanelles.
So why should we be concerned? What do our wives have to do with horse racing?

The emperor's wife will be abducted. Drums will beat loudly and other Berbers will come.
Berbers will fill the cities' emptiness, slightly higher than the sea, mightier than the sword in a time of madness.
So why should we be concerned? What do our children have to do with the children of this impudence?

Drums will beat loudly and other Berbers will come. The emperor's wife will be taken from his bedroom.
From his bedroom he will launch a military assault to return his bedmate to his bed.
Why should we be concerned? What do fifty thousand victims have to do with this brief marriage?

Can Homer be born after us . . . and myths open their doors to the throng?

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Mahmoud Darwish is the winner of the 2001 Lannan Prize for Cultural Freedom. He has published more than twenty books, including The Adam of Two Edens, Why Have You Left the Horse Alone, and Eleven Planets. Mr. Darwish is also the author of the Palestinian Declaration of Independence, written in 1988. In the fall of 2002, a new English translation of his Selected Poems will be published in the United States. Munir Akash is the author and editor of fourteen literary books and the recipient of the 1983 Targa Europa. A leading Arab critic, he is editor and publisher of Jusoor (Bridges), The Arab American Journal of Cultural Exchange. Carolyn Forche's new volume of poetry, Blue Hour, is forthcoming from HarperCollins in spring, 2003. contents | previous | next