Mahmoud Darwish - Judith Morrison
Mahmoud Darwish
excerpt from 'State of Siege'
When warplanes leave the sky
white doves take flight
to scrub the blue with their free wings,
restoring its magnificent sheen and their sovereignty over
open space and play, their white wings
soaring higher and higher.
“Ah, If only the sky were real!” said one man
slithering in between two bombs.
Mahmoud Darwish wrote 'State of Siege' in Ramallah, Palestine under siege in Ramallah during the Israeli invasion of 2002.
State of Siege
Originally published in Arabic in 2002
Author: Mahmoud Darwish
English translation: Daniel Abdal-hayy Moore
Syracuse University Press, June 2010
ISBN-13 : 978-0815609230
Mahmoud Darwish was a Palestinian poet born in 1941, considered by may as Palestine's most eminent poet.. During the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, his village was destroyed and his family fled to Lebanon, returning the following year and secretly re-entering their homeland. Over years Darwish faced house arrest and imprisonment for his political activism and poetry. He joined the Rakah political party in the 1960s. He lived in exile for twenty-six years, between Beirut and Paris, until 1996 when settled in Ramallah.
Darwish’s awards and honors include the Ibn Sina Prize, the Lenin Peace Prize, the 1969 Lotus Prize from the Union of Afro-Asian Writers, France’s Knight of Arts and Belles Lettres medal in 1997, the 2001 Prize for Cultural Freedom from the Lannan Foundation, the Moroccan Wissam of Intellectual Merit and the USSR’s Stalin Peace Prize. He was editor of Palestinian Affairs from 1973 to 1982 and in 1981 he founded and edited the journal Al-Karmel.
Judith Morrison chose to foreground this poem by Mahmoud Darwish.
Judith Morrison
the thread of terror
(Gaza November 2023)
the thread of terror
stained the baby’s shroud
there is no silence
only a heavy lament
that sinks into the rubble earth
an empty cradle
swings to and fro
stranded between shadows
marking a cut- out open door
dawn is lost to dust
a new day never begins
empty eyes no longer count
the hours as they tumble
into a grief with no barriers
statues of naked limp trees
bare witness to a season lost
the gathering of song exiled
as the thread of terror
dismantles the sky
into ash
Judith Morrison is a poet who lives and writes on the land of the Wurundjeri people who have never ceded their land.
Olive branches with a few olives reach across a bright green sky.
