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The Palestinian Poet
Mahmoud Darweesh wrote his last poem “A State of Siege” on
January 2002, in
Ramallah, the political capital of the Palestinian National
Authority since
1994.
Darweesh was born March
13, 1941, in Alberweh village near the city of Acre, Palestine.
He left with his family
after Jewish terrorist gangs stormed his village. After spending one
year in Lebanon the
family managed to return to Palestine. His first batch of poems
appeared 1960 under the
title “ Sparrows Without Wings”
Successive poems
appeared while our poet was spending his days between Israeli
prisons and home arrest.
In the year 1970 he went to college in Moscow where thousands
of Palestinian students
furthered their education. But Darweesh decided not to go back to
his village, one of few
lucky Palestinian localities that the nascent Jewish state did not
erased along with other
450 villages turned to rubbles.
Cairo was Darweesh next
stop and the Beirut where settled down and issued Alkarmel
Magazine. Again, the
poet was forced to leave Beirut along with other Palestine
Liberation
Organization’s members
in the aftermath of the Israeli Army storming the first Arab capital
to be occupied by the
Israelis.
Mahmoud Darweesh kept
jetting between Arab and European cities; writing poetry in all
circumstances.
The Palestinian poet
rejected “Oslo Accords” and resigned his membership in the PLO,
but returned to
Palestine in 1996 and settled down in Ramallah.
Darweesh’s important
works were: “ A Lover from Palestine” 1966, “ I Love You or I Don’t
Love You” 1971, “Attempt
Number 7” 1973, “ That’s her Picture … and that The Lover’s Suicide”
1975, “ Praising the Supreme Shadow”1983, “ Siege of the Sea’s
Praises” 1984, “Less
Roses” 1986, “ It Is a Song…It Is a Song” 1987, “ I See What I Want
“
1988, “ Eleven Planets”
1992, “ Why You Let the Horse Alone?” 1995, “ The Bed of the
Stranger (Woman) 1999.
Among his prose
writings: “Diaries of Usual Sadness” 1973, “Something About the
Homeland” 1975, “ A
Memory for Forgetness” 1986 and a “In Describing Our Predicament”
1987.
“ A State of Siege” is
his latest work; it is a long poem written in Ramallah, Jan. 2002.
Excerpts from “ A State
of Siege”: -
Here, near the slopes of
the hills, ahead of sunset
And the mouth of time,
Near orchards of
truncated shadows,
Doing what the prisoners
are doing:
Raising hopes.
A land ready for the
dawn,
We became less
intelligent,
Because we stare at the
clock of victory:
No night in our
artillery-sprinkled night
And our enemies are
torching light for us
In the darkness of the
gloomy callers
He says at the edge of
death:
No foothold of loss was
left on me,
Free I am near my
freedom
And my tomorrow in my
hand…
I’ll enter, little
while, my life
And born again free
without parents,
And I’ll choose for my
name letters from the Lapis Lazuli
You who are standing on
the steps come in,
And have Arabic coffee
with us
(You may feel that you
are humans like us)
You who are standing on
the steps come in,
Get out from our
mornings,
We are assured then that
we are
Humans like you!
And find time for
amusement:
To play dice like you,
or thumbing our news
In wounded yesterday’s
papers,
And read our horoscope:
in year
Two thousands and two,
the camera smiles
To the Zodiac of Siege’s
birthdays
Every death,
However expected,
Is the first death
Then how can I see
A moon
Sleeping underneath of
every stone?
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