Khalil Hawi

Khalil Hawi Poems

Khalil Hawi Biography

Khalil Hawi grew up in Shwayr, Lebanon. He studied philosophy and Arabic at the American University of Beirut, where he received a bachelor of arts in 1951 and a master of arts in 1955. After teaching for a few years, he obtained a scholarship to enroll at Cambridge University, in England, where he was awarded his Ph.D. in 1959. He then became a professor of Arabic literature at the American University in Beirut. Within a few years, he established himself as one of the leading avant-garde poets in the Arab world. His poetry relies heavily on symbols and metaphors and images, and it frequently has political and social overtones. An Arab nationalist at heart, he repeatedly expressed his sense of shame and rage at the loss of Palestine in 1948 and at subsequent Arab defeats at the hands of Israel. He was very critical of Arab regimes for their demonstrated lack of pan-Arab solidarity, and he denounced the hedonism, materialism, and corruption that prevailed in Beirut before the civil war broke out. More generally, he lamented what he saw as the Arab world's political and cultural decay, and he expressed deep pessimism about the possibility of a true Arab cultural and political revival. His deeply felt feelings of frustration and powerlessness at the decline of Arab society and culture and at the Arab world's impotence on the international scene are shared by an entire generation of Arab intellectuals confronted with political authoritarianism and the failure of attempts at Arab unity, as well as persistent and costly inter-Arab rivalries. After 1975, Khalil Hawi experienced the desperation felt by all Lebanese who had to watch their country's slow descent into chaos, internal disintegration, and manipulation by outside powers. He was outraged by Lebanon's inability to stand up to the Israeli army when the latter invaded on 3 June 1982, and he deeply resented the other Arab governments' silence about the Israeli invasion. He committed suicide on 6 June 1982.)

The Best Poem Of Khalil Hawi

The Mariner Of Dervish

The wandered with Ulysses in the unknown
and with faust he sacrificed his soul
for the sake of knowledge. estranged like huxley,
set sail for the banks of the Cango, that fountainhead of sufism.
Here, he saw naught but lifeless clay;
there, naught but warm clay. clay exchange for clay.
After bearing with seasickness,
The false light across the darkened path,
And unknown expanses unfolding out of the unknown,
Out of death, encompassing,
Spreading blue shrouds for the drowned,
Unfolding cavernous jaws on the horizon's void
wrapped in the fire' blaze;
Then, tricked by the wind,
He was cast up on the shores of the antique East.
He put down in a land storytellers speak of,
A slothful tavern, legends, prayer.
The feeble shade of listlessly murmuring palm trees,
A humid backwash that numbs all feeling
In heated nerves, numbs all memory,
The distant repeated echo
And the lure of distant ports.
O if the naked, ascetic dervishes would but help him!
Giddied by their ''circles of remembrance'' they had crossed the frontier of life.
Circles, circles
Around an antique dervish,
His legs rooted in the mud. motionless
He stands, absorbs the distillations of barren plants,
Watermoss aged by the passage of time and ivy thickly growing.
Untouched by feeling he will never wake,
His share of the season of the fertility that courses through the veins
Only a cloth that plants elegant beauty
On his ancient tattered skin.
Come, tell of the treasure that have driven
Your eyes down into the deep unknown.
Crouching in this backwash a thousand times a thousand years,
Crouching on the primeval Cango's bank,
The roads of the world, however distant,
At my door all end, all,
And in my hut rest the twins:
God and boundless time.
And I see ... what ?
Death, ashes and fire,
Descending on the western shore !
Gaze out, you will see !
Or can you not bear that foaming ghoul?
The ports are earth is pregnant, writhes and suffers,
And now and then sutsts forth,
Bursts forth with an Athens or Rome!
As the heat of a fever rattling in a wastes chest
leaves behind an odd blister
And ashes from the refuse of time.
That suffering ghoul,
I see him only as a child born of the seconds' passage,
And a gray-haired hand unravels from his nerves
His shrouds, and death is near.
And you see me,
Crouching in this backwash a thousand times a thousand years,
Crouching on the Cango's primeval bank,
And in my hut rest the twins:
God and boundless time.
Do you think yourself burdened with a vision of truth unbearable?
Let me walk on to the unknown,
The distant ports will not deceive me,
Some of fevered clay,
Some of lifeless clay.
O how often did i burn in that fevered clay!
O how often did I die in that lifeless clay!
The distant ports will not deceive me:
Leave me to the sea to the wind, to death
Who spreads blue shrouds for the drowned,
A mariner, to whose eye are dead the lighthouses on the path.
Dead is thet light in his eyes, dead';
Heroic deeds save him not, nor humility of prayer.

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