Rating: 10/10

My Thoughts:

Mahmoud Darwish is a skillfull poet. In his final work, all the experience he accumulated throughout his lifetime add up to this masterpiece. Beautiful, unique, sensitive.

Quotes:

“Letters lie before you, so release them from their neutrality and play with them like a conqueror in a delirious universe.”

“All letters are ready to receive the form / being in search of a skillfil hadn to create the need for harmony.”

“How can the sea be imprisoned in three letters, the second of which overflows with salt? How can letters take on so many words? How can words have enough space to embrace the world?”

“They called you the dreamer because you so often gave words wings invisible to grown-ups. You provoked the obscure and became a stranger.”

“Grasp your own reality and grasp your name and learn how to write your own proof. You, you and not your ghost, were the one driven out into the night.”

“You and you are not you at the same time. Your are divided into an interior that exists and an exterior that enters.”

“You cried like never before. You cried with all your senses. You cried as if you were not crying, but melting all at once and raining.”

“You wonder, as someone else has: Are we what we do with time, or are we what time does with us? Finding a response does not interest you as much as slowing down time. You do not want this autumn to end, just as you do not want the poem to grow to fullness and end. You do not want to reach winter. Let autumn be your private eternity.”

“You pause for a long time beofre an iris that sprang up alone, nowhere near a pot. Not because, like you, it is a stranger among flowers, but because it relies on itself in growing on its own.”

“Cities are smells: Acre is the smell of iodine and spices. Haifa is the smell of pine and wrinkled sheets. Moscow is the smell of vodka on ice. Cairo is the smell of mango and ginger. Beirut is the smell of the sun, sea, smoke, and lemons. Damascus is the smell of jasmine and dried fruit. A city that cannot be known by its smell is unreliable. Exiles have a shared smell: the smell of longing for something , a smell that remembers another smell”

“To the obscure: the pastime that turned into a profession and the profession that never stopped being a pastime.”

“When asleep, you are your own overlord and sovereign. Alive, but without life`s burdens. Alive in a metaphorical death chosen with the care of an angel to train the body for the visit of the invisible in a mutually befitting form.”

“Ever you set pen and paper nearby as a trap to catch the dream, the dream became fearful of being penned. Perheps because it does not want to be penned or summoned on command, you must not wait for it the way you wait for inspiration. It will come like a sovereign, without permission, as does love.”

“You realized what you had never realized before. Death does not pain the dead, it pains the living.”

“Longing is the absent chatting with the absent.”

“Thus, longing is born from every beautiful incident and not from a wound. Longing is not a memory, but rather what is selected from memory`s musuem. […] It is the replaying of a memory after its blemishes have been removed.”

“Love, like meaning, is out on the open road, but like poetry, it is difficult. It requires talent, endurance, and skillful formulation, because of its many stations.”

“So do you know how to love? You cannot answer, perhaps because you did not notice the subtle atmospheric shifts when traveling from pole to pole: love and passion, rapture and infatuation, ardor and affection, fondness and devotion, blazing love and bewildering love, craving and caprice, dalliance and desire, longing and lust, admiration and attraction, and other desires in search of senses. […] So you never know where or how you are.”

“Gaza is pride taking pride in its name, unceasingly provoked by the world`s silence before its long siege.”

“You wonder: What kind of a linguistic or legal wunderknd could formulate a piece treaty and good neighborliness between a palace and a shack, between a guard and a prisoner?”

“You walk down the alleys ashamed of everything: your ironed shirts, aesthetics of poetry, the abstractness of music, and a passport that allows you to travel the world. You are stabbed by a pain in your consciousness.”

“You said to me: Love is neither happiness nor misery, but rather the senses finding the harmony and discord of resemblance through everrenewing desire.”