Nostalgia To The Light

by Mahmoud Darwish

Nostalgia To The Light 

What Annoying the people if we walked in the light of day

And carried your handbag and umbrella

And took your mouth at the corner of the wall

And picked a kiss

your Eyes

I dreaming to see your eyes sleeping

to see the calm of the sea at sunrise

your Lips

I dreaming to see your lips when kissing

I see the sun flare in the birth of a wedding

What upset the night if I have lit two candles

and I saw your face washed by the beam

And saw the river of Ivory guarded by the Marble of boats

then I will be back to childhood to breastfeeding

From the well of my tragedies, calling your eyes

To carry the Vintage of brightness to my veins 

What annoying the people if I put my head between your hands and cuddling your Waist in the road .

Intensive Care Unit 

I whirl with the wind as the earth narrows before me.

I would fly off and rein in the wind, 

but I am human.. I felt a million flutes tear at my breast.

Coated with ice I saw my grave carried on my palms. 

I disintegrated over the bed. Threw up.

Lost consciousness for a while. Died.

Cried out before that short-lived death occurred:

I love you, shall I enter into death through your feet?

And I died.. I was completely extinguished.

How serene death is except for your weeping!

And how tranquil if it wasn't for your hands

pounding my breasts to have me return.

I loved you before and after death,

and between the two I saw only my mother's face.

It was the heart that strayed for a while,

and then returned. I ask my love:

In which heart was I struck?

She bent over me and covered my question with a tear.

O heart... heart, how is it you lied to me and disrupted my climax ?

We have plenty of time, heart ,

stabilize So that a hoopoe bird may fly

to you from the land of Balqis (Yemen). 

We have sent letters. 

We have crossed thirty seas and sixty coast lines 

and still there is time in life for greater wanderings. 

And O heart, how is it that you lied to a mare

that never tires of the winds. Hold on 

so we can complete this final embrace and kneel 

in worship. Hold on..hold on.

Let me find out if you are my heart or her voice crying: Take me. 

Slain And Unknown… 

Slain and unknown. Neither gathered up by forgetfulness 

nor dispersed by memory…they're forgotten 

in winter grass on the road that runs between 

two long tales, one of heroics, the other of suffering. 

'I'm the victim here.' 

'No, only I am the victim.' 

No one says to a poet: 'One victim doesn't kill another. 

In the story there's a killer and a victim.' 

Once they were young, shaking snow from 

the sacred cypress of Christ and playing 

with small angels - 

sons who were of the same generation… slipping away from school to escape mathematics 

and the old hamasa poetry to play an innocent game 

of death with soldiers on the barricades. 

And they didn't say to the soldiers: 

'Put away your guns and open the road so a butterfly 

might find its mother near morning, so we might 

fly with the butterfly out of our dreams, for dreams 

are narrow at our door.' 

They were young and at play, making up stories 

to tell a red rose still under snow, behind two long tales, 

of heroics and suffering, and escaping with small angels 

to a clear sky…