Mahmoud Darwish Quotes

I never wanted children; maybe I'm afraid of responsibility.

Life to the last drop
If someone said to me again: 'Supposing you were to die tomorrow, what would you do?' I wouldn't need any time to reply. If I felt drowsy, I would sleep. If I was thirsty, I would drink. If I was writing, I might like what I was writing and ignore the question. If I was having lunch, I would add a little mustard and pepper to the slice of grilled meat. If I was shaving, I might cut my earlobe. If I was kissing my girlfriend, I would devour her lips as if they were figs. If I was reading, I would skip a few pages. If I was peeling an onion, I would shed a few tears. If I was walking, I would continue walking at a slower pace. If I existed, as I do now, then I wouldn't think about not existing. If I didn't exist, then the question wouldn't bother me. If I was listening to Mozart, I would already be close to the realms of the angels. If I was asleep, I would carry on sleeping and dream blissfully of gardenias. If I was laughing, I would cut my laughter by half out of respect for the information. What else could I do, even if I was braver than an idiot and stronger than Hercules?

Sometimes I feel as if I am read before I write. When I write a poem about my mother, Palestinians think my mother is a symbol for Palestine. But I write as a poet, and my mother is my mother. She's not a symbol.

Please take your time. I want you to kill me slowly so I can write my last
poem to my wife's heart. They laughed, and took from me
only the words dedicated to my wife's heart.

We see them oiling their weapons to kill the gryphon they think is hiding in our hen coop. And we cannot help laughing.

I look out on my language, two days later
A short absence is enough
for Aeschylus to open the door to peace
a short speech is enough
for Antonio to incite war
A hand of a woman in my hand
is enough
to embrace my freedom
and for the ebb and flow to begin anew in my body
(I See my Ghost Coming from a Distance)

Every beautiful poem is an act of resistance,

The metaphor for Palestine is stronger than the Palestine of reality.

I see what I want of Love ... I see horses making the meadow dance, fifty guitars sighing, and a swarm of bees suckling the wild berries, and I close my eyes until I see our shadow behind this dispossessed place ...
I see what I want of people: their desire to long for anything, their lateness in getting to work and their hurry to return to their folk ... and their need to say: Good Morning ...

If I Were Another


If I were another on the road, I would not have looked

back, I would have said what one traveler said

to another: Stranger! awaken

the guitar more! Delay our tomorrow so our road

may extend and space may widen for us, and we may get rescued

from our story together: you are so much yourself ... and I am

so much other than myself right here before you!


If I were another I would have belonged to the road,

neither you nor I would return. Awaken the guitar

and we might sense the unknown and the route that tempts

the traveler to test gravity. I am only

my steps, and you are both my compass and my chasm.

If I were another on the road, I would have

hidden my emotions in the suitcase, so my poem

would be of water, diaphanous, white,

abstract, and lightweight ... stronger than memory,

and weaker than dewdrops, and I would have said:

My identity is this expanse!


If I were another on the road, I would have said

to the guitar: Teach me an extra string!

Because the house is farther, and the road to it prettier -

that's what my new song would say. Whenever

the road lengthens the meaning renews, and I become two

on this road: I ... and another!

My love, I fear the silence of your hands.

because you are die surface of my sky.
My body is the land,
the place for you...
the pigeons fly
the pigeons come down...

I learnt all the words worthy of the court of blood
So that I could break the rule
I learnt all the words and broke them up
To make a single word:
Homeland..

The poem is in my hands, and can run stories through her hands.

A bit of mist and light suffice for life to overpower nothingness. A bit of hope and time suffice for you to cross the mountain trails of myth; you were spared the fate of your ancestors. So borrow the wisdom of the anemones and say: Nothingness does not concern me, even if death besieges me.

We have on this earth what makes life worth living: April's hesitation, the aroma of bread at dawn, a woman's point of view about men, the works of Aeschylus, the beginning of love, grass on a stone, mothers living on a flute's sigh and the invaders' fear of memories.

It would be the simplest thing to say, my homeland is where I was born. But when you returned, you found nothing. What does that mean? It would be the simplest thing to say, my homeland is where I will die. But you could die anywhere, or on the border between two places. What does that mean? After a while the question will become harder. Why did you leave? Why did you leave? For twenty years you have been asking, why did they leave? Leaving is not a negation of the homeland, but it does turn the problem into a question. Do not write a history now. When you do that, you leave the past behind, and what is required is to call the past to account. Do not write a history except that of your wounds. Do not write a history except that of your exile. You are here - here, where you were born. And where longing will lead you to death. So, what is homeland?

كل ما مخض عنه
الخيال البشري من ابداعات الشر الخارقة, وما بلغته التكنولوجيا من قدم, يجري امتحان فاعليتها في أجسادنا
اليوم

(All the unimaginably evil inventions human creativity has ever come up with and all the advances technology has achieved - their efficacy is now being tested on our bodies.)

They want time to move fast so they can paint their nails a provocative red and wear high heels that crack walnuts and make people jump. He wants time to slow down so he can prolong the enjoyment of walking among them, of being next to this self-contained beauty.

Put it on record
--I am an Arab
And the number of my card is fifty thousand
I have eight children
And the ninth is due after summer.
What's there to be angry about?

Put it on record.
--I am an Arab
Working with comrades of toil in a quarry.
I have eight childern
For them I wrest the loaf of bread,
The clothes and exercise books
From the rocks
And beg for no alms at your doors,
--Lower not myself at your doorstep.
--What's there to be angry about?

Put it on record.
--I am an Arab.
I am a name without a tide,
Patient in a country where everything
Lives in a whirlpool of anger.
--My roots
--Took hold before the birth of time
--Before the burgeoning of the ages,
--Before cypess and olive trees,
--Before the proliferation of weeds.

My father is from the family of the plough
--Not from highborn nobles.
And my grandfather was a peasant
--Without line or genealogy.
My house is a watchman's hut
--Made of sticks and reeds.
Does my status satisfy you?
--I am a name without a surname.

Put it on Record.
--I am an Arab.
Color of hair: jet black.
Color of eyes: brown.
My distinguishing features:
--On my head the 'iqal cords over a keffiyeh
--Scratching him who touches it.
My address:
--I'm from a village, remote, forgotten,
--Its streets without name

I see poetry as spiritual medicine.

I'll emerge, with wings, from the banner I am, bird
that never alights on trees in the garden
I will shed my skin and my language.
Some of my words of love will fall into
Lorca's poems; he'll live in my bedroom
and see what I have seen of the Bedouin moon. I'll emerge
from almond trees like cotton on sea foam

We have to understand - not justify - what gives rise to this tragedy. It's not because they're looking for beautiful virgins in heaven, as Orientalists portray it. Palestinian people are in love with life. If we give them hope - a political solution - they'll stop killing themselves.

In a world that has no heaven the earth becomes an abyss.
And the poem is one of its consolation prizes.
One of the qualities of the winds, north or south

He says I am from there, I am from here, but I am neither there nor here. I have two names which meet and part ... I have two languages, but I have long forgotten - which is the language of my dreams

So let there be prose.
There must be a divine prose for the Prophet to triumph

The boy went back to his family there, in the distance, in a distance he did not find there in the distance. My grandfather died counting sunsets, seasons, and heartbeats on the fingers of his withered hands. He dropped like a fruit forbidden a branch to lean its age against. They destroyed his heart. He wearied of waiting here, in Damur. He said goodbye to friends, water pipe, and children and took me and went back to find what was no longer his to find there. Here the number of aliens increased, and refugee camps got bigger. A war went by, then two, three, and four. The homeland got farther and farther away, and the children got farther and farther from mother's milk after they had tasted the milk of UNRWA. So they bought guns to get closer to a homeland flying out of their reach. They brought their identity back into being, re-created the homeland, and followed their path, only to have it blocked by the guardians of civil wars. They defended their steps, but then path parted from path, the orphan lived in the skin of the orphan, and one refugee camp went into another.

Poetry and beauty are always making peace. When you read something beautiful you find coexistence; it breaks walls down.

Some people ask, 'How do you attract the young and so many different people when your poetry is complicated and different?' I say, 'My accomplishment is that my readers trust me and accept my suggestions for change.'

How often have I held back my complaint: Why should the Lebanese homeland be incompatible with Palestine? Why should the Egyptian loaf be incompatible with Palestine? Why should the Syrian roof be incompatible with Palestine? Why should Palestine be incompatible with Palestine?

If the Olive Trees knew the hands that planted them, Their Oil would become Tears.

A small café, that's love.

I know who opens the door to the jasmine tree
as it makes our dreams blossom for the evening's guests.

The long road has drained me of all feelings and expectations. I don't feel a thing or expect anything now.

And I tell myself, a moon will rise from my darkness.

I am not a lover of Israel, of course. I have no reason to be. But I don't hate Jews.

I am from there. I am from here. I am not there and I am not here. I have two names, which meet and part, and I have two languages. I forget which of them I dream in.

I don't decide to represent anything except myself. But that self is full of collective memory.

They asked "do you love her to death?"
I said "speak of her over my grave and watch how she brings me back to life.

One day I will become a bird and unsheathe my existence
out of my void. When the two wings burn
I'll near the truth and reincarnate
from ash. I am the dialogue of dreamers. I turned
away from my body and my self to complete
my first journey toward meaning, but meaning
burned me and disappeared. I am absence.
The heavenly and the expelled

from "Mural

I've built my homeland, I've even founded my state - in my language.

And we have the night ahead of us
to stroll in lilac-scented gardens. Everything there
is here. It is all ours. You are mine, I am yours
and the shadow, your shadow, laughs like an orange. The dream
did its job and, like a postman, hurried on
to someone else. So we have to be
worthy, this evening, of ourselves, and of a river
that runs along beside us, and that we flow into as it flows into us.

Longing is the call of ney to ney to restore the direction broken by the horses' hooves in a military campaign. It is an intermittent ailment, neither contagious nor lethal, even when it takes the form of an epidemic. It is an invitation to stay up late with the lonesome and an excuse not to be on equal footing with train passengers who know their own addresses well. It is the transparent fabric of that beautiful nothingness, gathered to roast the coffee of wakefulness for the dreams of strangers.

Longing is the absent chatting with the absent. The distant turning toward the distant. Longing is the spring's thirst for the jar-carrying women, and vice versa. Longing allows distance to recede, as if looking forward, although it may be called hope, were an adventure and a poetic notion. The present tense is hesitant and perplexed, the past tense hangs from a cypress tree standing on its rooted leg behind a hill, enveloped in its dark green, listening intently to one sound only: the sound of the wind. Longing is the sound of the wind

And if happiness should surprise you again, do not mention its previous betrayal.
Enter into the happiness, and burst.

Have I had two roads, I would have chosen their third.

On this earth there is that which deserves life.

Maybe the moon is beautiful only because it is far.

Palestinian people are in love with life.

The only paradise we know through our senses and intuition is that of the beloved, and the only hell, disappointment in love.

So which of your Lord's favors do you two deny? You and I are absent, you and I are present and absent. So which of your Lord's favors do you two deny?

Dreamers don't abandon
their dreams, they flare and continue
the life they have in the dream…tell me
how you lived your dream in a certain place
and I'll tell you who you are. And now,
as you awaken, remember if you have wronged
your dream. And if you have, then remember
the last dance of the swan.

I prepare my portrait for my woman to hang on a wall when I die.
she says: Is there a wall to hang it on?
I say: We'll build a room for it. Where? In any house.

And what I don't understand I grasp it only when it's too late.

Exile is more than a geographical concept. You can be an exile in your homeland, in your own house, in a room.

When the image is identical to reality, the imagination is compelled to be neutral. Therefore let the image of the object lie to the object so we can see what lies beyond the object, and in the light of that vision see what saves us from nothingness.

I'll search in mythology and archeology
and in every -ology to my old name.
one of the goddesses of Canaan will side with me,
then swear with a flash of lightning.
This is my orphan son

Without hope we are lost.

Where
is my second road to the staircase of expanse? Where
is futility? Where is the road to the road?
And where are we, the marching on the footpath of the present
tense, where are we? Our talk a predicate
and a subject before the sea, and the elusive foam
of speech the dots on the letters,
wishing for the present tense a foothold
on the pavement …

If we want to

We will become a people, if we want to, when we learn that we are not angels, and that evil is not the prerogative of others
We will become a people when we stop reciting a prayer of thanksgiving to the sacred nation every time a poor man finds something to eat for his dinner
We will become a people when we can sniff out the sultan's gatekeeper and the sultan without a trial
We will become a people when a poet writes an erotic description of a dancer's belly
We will become a people when we forget what the tribe tells us, when the individual recognizes the importance of small details
We will become a people when a writer can look up at the stars without saying: 'Our country is loftier and more beautiful!'
We will become a people when the morality police protect a prostitute from being beaten up in the streets
We will become a people when the Palestinian only remembers his flag on the football pitch, at camel races, and on the day of the Nakba
We will become a people, if we want to, when the singer is allowed to chant a verse of Surat al-Rahman at a mixed wedding reception
We will become a people when we respect the right, and the wrong.

No one has arrived. Leave me there
as you would leave a myth with any person who sees you
until he cries and rushes into himself, afraid of happiness.

Perhaps death is a metaphor to remind us of a secret of life we failed to notice.

To be under occupation, to be under siege, is not a good inspiration for poetry.

Where can I free myself of the homeland in my body?

If you live, live free
or die like the trees, standing up.

In Damascus:
poems become diaphanous
They're neither sensual
nor intellectual
they are what echo says
to echo ...

I love you so, you are so much yourself!
He is so afraid of his soul:
no "I" now but she. She is now within me.
And no "she" now but only my fragile "I"
At the end of this song, how much I fear that my dream
may not see its dream in her.

She does not love you. Your metaphors thrill her you are her poet. But that's all there's to it.

Be my lover between two wars waged in the mirror, she said.
I don't want to return now to the fortress of my father's house.
Take me to your vineyard.
Let me meet your mother.
Perfume me with basil water.
Arrange me on silver dishes, comb me,
imprison me in your name,
let love kill me.

Standing here, staying here, permanent here, eternal here, and we have one goal, one, one: to be.

Don't say that poetry, my friend, is beautiful
or powerful
for there is no powerful or beautiful poetry
There is poetry that strikes you, secretly
with the diseases of writing and schizophrenia, and you rave
and your self leaves you for another

Sonnet V
I touch you as a lonely violin touches the suburbs of the faraway place
patiently the river asks for its share of the drizzle
and, bit by bit, a tomorrow passing in poems approaches
so I carry faraway's land and it carries me on travel's road
On a mare made of your virtues, my soul weaves
a natural sky made of your shadows, one chrysalis at a time.
I am the son of what you do in the earth, son of my wounds
that have lit up the pomegranate blossoms in your closed-up gardens
Out of jasmine the night's blood streams white. Your perfume,
my weakness and your secret, follows me like a snakebite. And your hair
is a tent of wind autumn in color. I walk along with speech
to the last of the words a bedouin told a pair of doves
I palpate you as a violin palpates the silk of the faraway time
and around me and you sprouts the grass of an ancient place - anew

The importance of poetry is not measured, finally, by what the poet says but by how he says it.

I used to love winter,
and I would listen to it,
drop by drop.
Rain, rain like an appeal to a lover,
Pour down my body!
Winter was not lament pointing
to the end of life. It was the beginning. It was hope.
So what shall I do, as life falls like hair?
What will I do this winter?

The stars had only one task: they taught me how to read.
They taught me I had a language in heaven
and another language on earth.

I thought poetry could change everything, could change history and could humanize, and I think that the illusion is very necessary to push poets to be involved and to believe, but now I think that poetry changes only the poet.

I wish I were a candle in the darkness.

If there must be a moon, let it be high,
a high moon made in Baghdad, neither Arab, nor Persian,
nor claimed by the goddesses all around us.

And you became like the coffee,
In the deliciousness,
and the bitterness
and the addiction.

Life defined only as the opposite of death is not life.

Poetry is perhaps what teaches us to nurture the charming illusion: how to be reborn out of ourselves over and over again, and use words to construct a better world, a fictitious world that enables us to sign a pact for a permanent and comprehensive peace ... with life.