She asks: Why do clouds scrape the tops of trees? I say: Because legs cling to one another in the drizzling rain. She asks: Why does a frightened cat stare at me? I say: So that you stop the storm. She asks: Why does the stranger long for yesterday? I say: So that poetry can be independent. She asks: Why does the sky turn ashen in the evening? I say: Because you have not watered the flowers.
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To Describe an almond blossom
To Describe an almond blossom no encyclopedia of flowers is any help to me, no dictionary.
Words carry me off to snares of rhetoric that wound the sense, and praise the wound they've made.
How can the almond blossom shine in my own language, when I am but an echo ?
It is translucent, like liquid laughter that has sprouted on boughs out of the shy dew...
light as a musical phrase ...
weak as the glance of a thought that peaks out from our fingers as in vain we write it ...
dense as a line of verse not arranged alphabetically.
To describe an almond blossom, I need to make visits to the unconscious,
which guides me to affectionate names hanging on trees.
What is its name ?
What is the name of this thing in the poetics of nothing ?
I must break out of gravity and words, in order to feel their lightness when they turn into whispering
ghosts, and I make them as they make me, a white translucent.
Neither homeland or exile are words, but passions of whiteness in the description of the almond blossom.
Neither snow or cotton.
One wonders how it rises above things and names.
If a writer were to compose a successful piece describing an almond blossom, the fog would rise from the
hills, and people, all the people, would say:
This is it.
These are the words of our national anthem.
Almond Blossoms and Beyond: Poems by Mahmoud Darwish Translated by : Mahammad ShaheenInterlink Books ISBN: 978-1-56656-755-8