Mahmoud Darwish

“We journey towards a home that does not halo our head with a special sun.Mythical women applaud us. A sea for us, a sea against us.”

“If there must be a moon, let it be high,a high moon made in Baghdad, neither Arab, nor Persian,nor claimed by the goddesses all around us.”

“One day, I will be a poet. Water will depend on my visions.”

“So let there be prose. There must be a divine prose for the Prophet to triumph”

“The poem is in my hands, and can run stories through her hands.”

“The poem is neither here nor there, and with a girl's breastit can illuminate the nights.With the glow of an apple it fills two bodies with lightand with a gardenia's breath it can revive a homeland!”

“The stars had only one task: they taught me how to read.They taught me I had a language in heavenand another language on earth.”

“Be my lover between two wars waged in the mirror, she said.I don't want to return now to the fortress of my father's house.Take me to your vineyard.Let me meet your mother.Perfume me with basil water.Arrange me on silver dishes, comb me, imprison me in your name,let love kill me.”

“No one has arrived. Leave me thereas you would leave a myth with any person who sees youuntil he cries and rushes into himself, afraid of happiness.”

“I love you so, you are so much yourself!He is so afraid of his soul:no "I" now but she. She is now within me.And no "she" now but only my fragile "I"At the end of this song, how much I fear that my dreammay not see its dream in her.”

“I know who opens the door to the jasmine treeas it makes our dreams blossom for the evening's guests.”

“Please take your time. I want you to kill me slowly so I can write my lastpoem to my wife's heart. They laughed, and took from meonly the words dedicated to my wife's heart.”

“I prepare my portrait for my woman to hang on a wall when I die.she says: Is there a wall to hang it on?I say: We'll build a room for it. Where? In any house.”

“Where can I free myself of the homeland in my body?”

“Where can I write my latest account of the body's incarnation?It's the end of what was bound to end! Where is that which ends?Where can I free myself of the homeland in my body?”

“May poetry and God's name have mercy on us!”

“I love women whose hidden desires make horses put an end to their lives at the threshold”

“I'll search in mythology and archeologyand in every -ology to my old name.one of the goddesses of Canaan will side with me,then swear with a flash of lightning.This is my orphan son”

“In a world that has no heaven the earth becomes an abyss.And the poem is one of its consolation prizes.One of the qualities of the winds, north or south”

“Life defined only as the opposite of death is not life.”

“She does not love you.Your metaphors thrill heryou are her poet.But that's all there's to it.from “She Does Not Love You”

“I learnt all the words worthy of the court of bloodSo that I could break the ruleI learnt all the words and broke them upTo make a single word:Homeland..”

“We suffer from an incurable malady: Hope.”

“We are captives, even if our wheat grows over the fences/ and swallows rise from our broken chains./ We are captives of what we love, what we desire, and what we are.”

“I am from there. I am from here.I am not there and I am not here.I have two names, which meet and part,and I have two languages.I forget which of them I dream in.”

“Have I had two roads, I would have chosen their third.”

“The days have taught you not to trust happiness because it hurts when it deceives.”

“I see a bird carrying me and carrying you, with us as its wings, beyond the dream, to a journey that has no end and no beginning, no purpose and no goal. I do not speak to you, and you do not speak to me; we listen only to the music of silence. Silence is the friend's trust of friend, imagination's self-confidence between rain and rainbow. A rainbow is inspiration provoking the poet, uninvited, the infatuation of the poet with the prose of the Quran. Which of your Lord's blessings do you disown? We are absent, you and I; we are present, you and I. And absent. Which of your Lord's blessings do you disown?”

“Far away, our dreams have nothing to do with what we do. The wind carries the night, and passes on, aimless.”

“I see what I want of Love... I see horses making the meadow dance, fifty guitars sighing, and a swarm of bees suckling the wild berries, and I close my eyes until I see our shadow behind this dispossessed place... I see what I want of people: their desire to long for anything, their lateness in getting to work and their hurry to return to their folk... and their need to say: Good Morning...”

“we Do as the ascendants to GOD ; the prisoners and the unemployeds Do , we Forget the Pain & Raise Hope ~”

“My love, I fear the silence of your hands.”

“A poem exists only in the relation between poet and reader. And I'm in need of my readers, except that they never cease to write me as they would wish, turning their reading into another writing that almost rubs out my features. I don't know why my poetry has to be killed on the altar of misunderstanding or the fallacy of ready-made intent. I am not solely a citizen of Palestine, though I am proud of this affiliation and ready to sacrifice my life in defending the radiance of the Palestinian fact, but I also want to take up the history of my people and their struggle from an aesthetic angle that differs from the prevalent and repeatable meanings readily available from an unmediated political reading.”

“The boy went back to his family there, in the distance, in a distance he did not find there in the distance. My grandfather died counting sunsets, seasons, and heartbeats on the fingers of his withered hands. He dropped like a fruit forbidden a branch to lean its age against. They destroyed his heart. He wearied of waiting here, in Damur. He said goodbye to friends, water pipe, and children and took me and went back to find what was no longer his to find there. Here the number of aliens increased, and refugee camps got bigger. A war went by, then two, three, and four. The homeland got farther and farther away, and the children got farther and farther from mother's milk after they had tasted the milk of UNRWA. So they bought guns to get closer to a homeland flying out of their reach. They brought their identity back into being, re-created the homeland, and followed their path, only to have it blocked by the guardians of civil wars. They defended their steps, but then path parted from path, the orphan lived in the skin of the orphan, and one refugee camp went into another. ”

“I want to find a language that transforms language itself into steel for the spirit--a language to use against these sparkling insects, these jets.”

“لفارق بين النرجس و عبّاد الشمس هوالفرق بين وجهتي نظر: الأول ينظر إلى صورته في الماء و يقول: لا انا إلا أنا. و الثاني ينظر إلى الشمس و يقول: ما انا إلاما أعبد.و في الليل، يضيق الفارق، و يتسع التأويل!”

“If the Olive Trees knew the hands that planted them, Their Oil would become Tears.”

“paz al sueño de los que tienen tiempo para la lectura. Paz a los fatigados""tengo la sabiduría del condenado a muerte: no tengo cosas que me posean""pregunto: señoras y señores de buena voluntad, ¿la tierra de los hombres es para todos los hombres / como afirmáis? entonces ¿dónde estoy yo, dónde está mi choza? la asamblea me aplaude (...) acaba de aprobar / nuestro derecho a volver, como todos los pollos, como todos los caballos, a un sueño de piedra (...)”

“... For me it is essential, essential for the poet to have a new toast, new songs.”