I Belong There

1941 –

2008

I belong there. I have many memories. I was born as everyone is born.
I have a mother, a house with many windows, brothers, friends, and a prison cell
with a chilly window! I have a wave snatched by seagulls, a panorama of my own.
I have a saturated meadow. In the deep horizon of my word, I have a moon,
a bird’s sustenance, and an immortal olive tree.
I have lived on the land long before swords turned man into prey.
I belong there. When heaven mourns for her mother, I return heaven to her mother.
And I cry so that a returning cloud might carry my tears.
To break the rules, I have learned all the words needed for a trial by blood.
I have learned and dismantled all the words in order to draw from them a
single word: Home.

From Unfortunately, It Was Paradise by Mahmoud Darwish translated and edited by Munir Akash and Carolyn Forché with Sinan Antoon and Amira El-Zein. Copyright © 2003 by the Regents of the University of California. Reprinted by permission of the University of California Press. All rights reserved.

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.

Mahmoud Darwish

2007

A Noun Sentence

A noun sentence, no verb 
to it or in it: to the sea the scent of the bed 
after making love ... a salty perfume 
or a sour one. A noun sentence: my wounded joy 
like the sunset at your strange windows. 
My flower green like the phoenix. My heart exceeding 
my need, hesitant between two doors: 
entry a joke, and exit 
a labyrinth. Where is my shadow—my guide amid 
the crowdedness on the road to judgment day? And I 
as an ancient stone of two dark colors in the city wall, 
chestnut and black, a protruding insensitivity 
toward my visitors and the interpretation of shadows.

Mahmoud Darwish

2007

Poems

I Belong There

More by this poet

Sonnet V

I Didn’t Apologize to the Well

A Noun Sentence

Poems

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I Belong There

More by this poet

Sonnet V

I Didn’t Apologize to the Well

A Noun Sentence

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