Mahmoud Darwish: The great Palestinian poet who died August 9th from complications arising from an open heart surgery operation in Texas, flown back to Ramala where his funeral and burial was attended and mourned by thousands of people… given a state funeral not occurring since the burial of Arafat.
In Memoriam Mahmoud Darwish
The exile dies and
finds he’s home
All lamented fig trees and
cups of pungent coffee
sweet steam in twists above them
All horses tied to fences
lonely without their donkeys
in long green pastures
All glimpses of far ocean
across the barbed wire of enemy territory
now held in a divinely vibrant wisp in the air
for a split second before dispersal
at lickety-split speed over the earth’s mirror
as the world’s top spins below
And the grieving exile opens his sapphire eyes
now polished to a precious sheen
on unforeseen landscapes not exactly
reassembled from the precise gazes in his
poems but partaking of certain
mosaic resemblances puzzled together
And also sees Paradise Gate open before him
and all his doubts and denials
now banished as brutally as he was
into inconsequential territories
afloat under fig trees
wrapped in fresh roasted
swirls of coffee
at home at last
among departed comrades
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8/13/2008
He was the Pablo Neruda of the Middle East, and most intimately the Palestinians or any displaced nation or persons, giving voice to such tragic and poignant realities that audiences would weep openly at his public readings. I was fortunate to work on the English of translations of his poems with Munir Akash, for a book that appeared from Syracuse University Press, The Adam of Two Edens, as well as the preliminary work on the book from the Lannan Foundation/University of California Press, Unfortunately It Was Paradise.
He began as a political poet defying the tragic political reality of his people, and ended as a lyrical-epic poet, “epic” in that, as Pound stipulated, his poems “contain history.” His rich imagination and passion and his dignity infuse his poems with the proud and grief-stricken representative voice of an entire ethnicity, and his like may not pass by this way again in terms of his towering literary stature and public appreciation.
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