Mahmoud Darwish

‘In the midst of what is going on now, it is hard, when you sit down at a desk, to feel that morning after morning spent fiddling with words and rhythms is a justified activity.’

Poetry cannot afford ‘to lose its fundamentally self-delighting inventiveness, its joy in being a process of language as well as a representation of things in the world.’

‘If I write love poems, I resist the conditions that don’t allow me to write love poems.’

‘I know they’re strong and can invade and kill anyone. But they can’t break or occupy my words.’

But the individual fighter is not a soldier in the presence of the one he loves

someone has to be absent to lighten the burden of the place.

Silence is a sound which has evaporated and disappeared in the wind and fragmented into echoes preserved in cosmic water jars.

If we were to listen intently to the sound of silence, we would talk less.

A river was here
and it had two banks
and a heavenly mother who nursed it on drops from the clouds
A small river moving slowly
descending from the mountain peaks
visiting villages and tents like a charming lively guest
bringing oleander trees and date palms to the valley
and laughing to the nocturnal revellers on its banks:
‘Drink the milk of the clouds
and water the horses
and fly to Jerusalem and Damascus’
Sometimes it sang heroically
at others passionately
It was a river with two banks
and a heavenly mother who nursed it on drops from the clouds
But they kidnapped its mother
so it ran short of water
and died, slowly, of thirst.

Rebel against me as much as you can, and run
for there’s nothing behind us except what’s behind.’