How did you outrace doubt the day you died
playing a trick on my nerves with the news
and leaving us as though life were a momentary hostage?
When the plot falters, what ending will we give it?
How did you make the loss seem a mirage,
fixed in mind, or a test . . .
From on the walls, you projected Acre as an ending
walking into the ambush of absence,
a child of seashores and metaphor.
Night has its old job, coating the world in shades of gloom,
but day has an alternate role
since you swept away darkness with brightness
and planted a flame to bloom above the slopes of day,
you, who landed for me with Butterfly Effect
and smoothly vanished, like a crawling baby or late-night
parties that those sleeping spent wide awake.
Singular pride is an illusion now you are
the olive oil in the arms of the loaf.
You cooled August even as the last of summer burned its chaff and killed itself.
You brought down part of God’s purity.
Your ringing silence astonishes
the remnants of the jinn; in poetry filled by imagination
and by fate, I might make
my admonishment to you.
Bid a final peace to your ethereal paradises
for their rivers are flowing beneath you, the date of heaven yet to ripen.
How ridiculous for your rebellion,
little less than the infinite, to be in limbo.
Judgement Day calls not for foreboding,
for our god’s ear is diverted by sweet verse,
nor will man recoil to see you
pour those waters onto fire
so that the choice of good
should go untortured.
Ascend to your heaven; throw me a rope
and I will attach the epics you wrote
so you can spread meaning above and enlighten Satan
in the hope that your joyous god forgives the sins of Adam
that are not yours.
Dying in bed, you took vengeance on your adversary,
leaving his trigger to mourn
the lost aim of the sniper’s sights.
Shame on one who mocks my sobs –
I wipe away the tears to see you before me.
I don’t make the pain go with company, to
the places where it hurts . . .
or let the flow run the course of emotions
that head to an Eden more beautiful
than the wide-open promise.
Stop joking, Darwish,
come back, like Fairuz, early in the morning
and sing absence to me.
Enough of Mohammed’s words
until man repents and our homes
give birth to buildings
whose new floors are the edges of clouds.
Put your absence to death with meter,
leave us a few late poems
to enrage might with power.
Let your perfect talents take a break from your learning
in satisfaction, descendant of the ancient Babylonians,
don the glory of Enkidu,
of eloquence, of Iraq.
Darwish is the prize of prizes, should they win you.
Lucky is the village elder who lives again
in potent vineyards of juvenalia.
Wanderer through the olive groves like almond blossom,
you make even Tagore jealous
as one who defeats warhorses
with his words.
Away sadness, my tongue begs forgiveness
for I have a throne at the very edge of fate
when I address the horseman of being.
Away, sadness! Darwish finds elegies annoying
and I don’t care what he says, but what should I say
when shame reproaches me for burying in the harshest tragedy
the right of my grief to lament?
Darwish is a window on Haifa, and here
when we dream of meeting
we draw separation close by the end of vast distances
and, as if Ibn Rushd had slept on our pillows,
in a burst of optimism we become possessed
by an Andalus that passes the memory on to its people.
And what is memory but
your walk in the glow of morning
peering from an East,
from the dawn of ancient civilizations,
into a newness that is beautified, now
that death has made its peace with you.
Darwish is a window to a myriad libraries
that the Galilee reads slowly,
slowly and gloriously, without reaching the same old conclusions.
Congratulations, escapee from the grave
as you soar in the union of courage
and death.
Congratulations and bravo
to one who seized life and departed
towards the end
– giving new meaning to speed –
or to a meeting in a heaven where
the ladder to immortality leans against the clouds.
Thanks for being exempt,
I mean by being beyond comparison with the cockerels
for what are cockerels
but a perpetual sing-song that has forgotten the crime
in silence.
playing a trick on my nerves with the news
and leaving us as though life were a momentary hostage?
When the plot falters, what ending will we give it?
How did you make the loss seem a mirage,
fixed in mind, or a test . . .
From on the walls, you projected Acre as an ending
walking into the ambush of absence,
a child of seashores and metaphor.
Night has its old job, coating the world in shades of gloom,
but day has an alternate role
since you swept away darkness with brightness
and planted a flame to bloom above the slopes of day,
you, who landed for me with Butterfly Effect
and smoothly vanished, like a crawling baby or late-night
parties that those sleeping spent wide awake.
Singular pride is an illusion now you are
the olive oil in the arms of the loaf.
You cooled August even as the last of summer burned its chaff and killed itself.
You brought down part of God’s purity.
Your ringing silence astonishes
the remnants of the jinn; in poetry filled by imagination
and by fate, I might make
my admonishment to you.
Bid a final peace to your ethereal paradises
for their rivers are flowing beneath you, the date of heaven yet to ripen.
How ridiculous for your rebellion,
little less than the infinite, to be in limbo.
Judgement Day calls not for foreboding,
for our god’s ear is diverted by sweet verse,
nor will man recoil to see you
pour those waters onto fire
so that the choice of good
should go untortured.
Ascend to your heaven; throw me a rope
and I will attach the epics you wrote
so you can spread meaning above and enlighten Satan
in the hope that your joyous god forgives the sins of Adam
that are not yours.
Dying in bed, you took vengeance on your adversary,
leaving his trigger to mourn
the lost aim of the sniper’s sights.
Shame on one who mocks my sobs –
I wipe away the tears to see you before me.
I don’t make the pain go with company, to
the places where it hurts . . .
or let the flow run the course of emotions
that head to an Eden more beautiful
than the wide-open promise.
Stop joking, Darwish,
come back, like Fairuz, early in the morning
and sing absence to me.
Enough of Mohammed’s words
until man repents and our homes
give birth to buildings
whose new floors are the edges of clouds.
Put your absence to death with meter,
leave us a few late poems
to enrage might with power.
Let your perfect talents take a break from your learning
in satisfaction, descendant of the ancient Babylonians,
don the glory of Enkidu,
of eloquence, of Iraq.
Darwish is the prize of prizes, should they win you.
Lucky is the village elder who lives again
in potent vineyards of juvenalia.
Wanderer through the olive groves like almond blossom,
you make even Tagore jealous
as one who defeats warhorses
with his words.
Away sadness, my tongue begs forgiveness
for I have a throne at the very edge of fate
when I address the horseman of being.
Away, sadness! Darwish finds elegies annoying
and I don’t care what he says, but what should I say
when shame reproaches me for burying in the harshest tragedy
the right of my grief to lament?
Darwish is a window on Haifa, and here
when we dream of meeting
we draw separation close by the end of vast distances
and, as if Ibn Rushd had slept on our pillows,
in a burst of optimism we become possessed
by an Andalus that passes the memory on to its people.
And what is memory but
your walk in the glow of morning
peering from an East,
from the dawn of ancient civilizations,
into a newness that is beautified, now
that death has made its peace with you.
Darwish is a window to a myriad libraries
that the Galilee reads slowly,
slowly and gloriously, without reaching the same old conclusions.
Congratulations, escapee from the grave
as you soar in the union of courage
and death.
Congratulations and bravo
to one who seized life and departed
towards the end
– giving new meaning to speed –
or to a meeting in a heaven where
the ladder to immortality leans against the clouds.
Thanks for being exempt,
I mean by being beyond comparison with the cockerels
for what are cockerels
but a perpetual sing-song that has forgotten the crime
in silence.