Mahmoud Darwish/Marcel Khalife's "The Most Beautiful Love"

 The Most Beautiful Love

As the grass sprouts between the crevices of a rock

We were found one day as two strangers

the sky was crafting a star.. and a star

And I was composing a passage on love

For the sake of your eyes… its riches!

I study your eyes, truly I waited a while

As the summer awaited a bird

And I slept…  a sleep of refuge

For as an eye sleeps, so an eye wakes after a while

And cries for its other

We are lovers, until the moon sleeps

And we know that the embrace and the kiss

Are the nourishment of nights of love

And the morning calls my step to continue

upon the path is a new day!

We are friends, therefore journey beside me, hand in hand

Together, we make bread and songs

Why do we question this path… for what fate

walks with us?

What is the source of our courage?

For it is my sufficiency, and yours, that we journey

Together, for eternity

Why do we search the songs of sadness

In the volumes of ancient poetry?

And ask:  oh love!  Will you continue?

I love you, the love of the caravan - the oasis of grass and water

And the love of the poor - the loaf of bread

As the grass sprouts between the crevices of a rock

We were found one day as two strangers

And we remain companions forever

Mahmoud Darwish's "Diary of a Palestinian Wound"

Diary of a Palestinian Wound

النص العربي: لا يوجد

For Fadwa Tuqan

...

We do not need to be reminded:

Mount Carmel is in us

and on our eyelashes the grass of Galilee.

Do not say: If we could run to her like a river.

Do not say it:

We and our country are one flesh and bone.

***

Before June we were not fledgeling doves

so our love did not wither in bondage.

Sister, these twenty years

our work was not to write poems

but to be fighting.

***

The shadow that descends over your eyes

-demon of a God

who came out of the month of June

to wrap around our heads the sun-

his color is martyrdom

the taste of prayer.

How well he kills, how well he resurrects!

***

The night that began in your eyes-

in my soul it was a long night's end:

Here and now we keep company

on the road of our return

from the age of drought.

***

And we came to know what makes the voice of the nightingale

a dagger shining in the face of the invaders.

We came to know what makes the silence of the graveyard

a festival...orchards of life.

***

You sang your poems, I saw the balconies

desert their walls

the city square extending to the midriff of the mountain:

It was not music we heard.

It was not the color of words we saw:

A million heroes were in the room.

***

This land absorbs the skins of martyrs.

This land promises wheat and stars.

Worship it!

We are its salt and its water.

We are its wound, but a wound that fights.

***

Sister, there are tears in my throat

and there is fire in my eyes:

I am free.

No more shall I protest at the Sultan's Gate.

All who have died, all who shall die at the Gate of Day

have embraced me, have made of me a weapon.

***

Ah my intractable wound!

My country is not a suitcase

I am not a traveler

I am the lover and the land is the beloved.

***

The archaeologist is busy analyzing stones.

In the rubble of legends he searches for his own eyes

to show

that I am a sightless vagrant on the road

with not one letter in civilization's alphabet.

Meanwhile in my own time I plant my trees.

I sing of my love.

***

It is time for me to exchange the word for the deed

Time to prove my love for the land and for the nightingale:

For in this age the weapon devours the guitar

And in the mirror I have been fading more and more

Since at my back a tree began to grow.

Mahmoud Darwish's "The Prison Cell"

The Prison Cell
 
It is possible…
It is possible at least sometimes…
It is possible especially now
To ride a horse
Inside a prison cell
And run away…
It is possible for prison walls
To disappear.
For the cell to become a distant land
Without frontiers:

What did you do with the walls?
I gave them back to the rocks.
And what did you do with the ceiling?
I turned it into a saddle.
And your chains?
I turned it into a pencil.

The prison guard got angry.
He put an end to the dialogue.
He said he didn’t care for poetry.
And bolted the door of my cell.
He came back to see me.
In the morning.
He shouted at me:

Where did all this water come from?
I brought it from the Nile.
And the trees?
From the orchards of Damascus.
And the music?
From my heartbeat.

The prison guard got mad.
He put an end to my dialogue.
He said he didn’t like my poetry.
And bolted the door of my cell.
But he returned in the evening:

Where did this moon come from?
From the nights of Baghdad.
And the wine?
From the vineyards of Algiers.
And this freedom?
From the chain you tied me with last night.

The prison guard grew so sad…
He begged me to give him back
His freedom.

Mahmoud Darwish's "Your Night is of Lilac"

Your Night is of Lilac

The night sits wherever you are. Your night

is of lilac. Every now and then a gesture escapes

from the beam of your dimples, breaks the wineglass

and lights up the starlight. And your night is your shadow—

a fairy-tale piece of land to make our dreams

equal. I am not a traveler or a dweller

in your lilac night, I am he who was one day

me. Whenever night grew in you I guessed

the heart’s rank between two grades: neither

the self accepts, nor the soul accepts. But in our bodies

a heaven and an earth embrace. And all of you

is your night ... radiant night like planet ink. Night

is the covenant of night, crawling in my body

anesthetized like a fox’s sleepiness. Night diffusing a mystery

that illuminates my language, whenever it is clearer

I become more fearful of a tomorrow in the fist. Night

staring at itself safe and assured in its

endlessness, nothing celebrates it except its mirror

and the ancient shepherd songs in a summer of emperors

who get sick on love. Night that flourished in its Jahili poetry

on the whims of Imru’ el-Qyss and others,

and widened for the dreamers the milk path to a hungry

moon in the remoteness of speech ...