Mahmoud Darwish Poems

O those who pass between fleeting words
carry your names, and be gone
Rid our time of your hours, and be gone
Steal what you will from the blueness of the sea
And the sand of memory
Take what pictures you will, so that you understand
That which you never will:
...

I long for my mother's bread
My mother's coffee
Her touch
Childhood memories grow up in me
Day after day
...

And we, too, have the right to love the last days of autumn and ask:
Is there room in the field for a new autumn, so we may lie down like coals?
...

Don't believe our outlines, forget them
and begin from your own words.
As if you are the first to write poetry
or the last poet.
...

We do not need to be reminded:
Mount Carmel is in us
and on our eyelashes the grass of Galilee.
Do not say: If we could run to her like a river.
...

Still there is on thy saucers remains of honey
Kick out the flies so that you can protect the honey
Still there is on their vines clusters of grapes
O, guarders of vines, drive foxes out,
...

A stranger on the riverbank, like the river ... water
binds me to your name. Nothing brings me back from my faraway
to my palm tree: not peace and not war. Nothing
makes me enter the gospels. Not
a thing...
...

This road takes me; a horse guiding a horseman
A traveler like me cannot look back
I have walked far enough to know
where autumn begins:
there, behind the river,
...

Don't apologize for what you've done - I'm saying this
in secret. I say to my personal other:
Here all of your memories are visible:
Midday ennui in a cat's somnolence,
...

The pigeons fly,
the pigeons come down...
...