Quotes from Mahmoud Darwish

How often have I held back my complaint: Why should the Lebanese homeland be incompatible with Palestine? Why should the Egyptian loaf be incompatible with Palestine? Why should the Syrian roof be incompatible with Palestine? Why should Palestine be incompatible with Palestine?

No one has arrived. Leave me there as you would leave a myth with any person who sees you until he cries and rushes into himself, afraid of happiness.

the poem is a dice throw on a patch of darkness that may or may not glow

I'll emerge, with wings, from the banner I am, bird that never alights on trees in the garden— I will shed my skin and my language. Some of my words of love will fall into Lorca's poems; he'll live in my bedroom and see what I have seen of the Bedouin moon. I'll emerge from almond trees like cotton on sea foam

Do not be absent for too long, then come and ask about how am, details die with time and stories change.

One day I will become a bird and unsheathe my existence out of my void. When the two wings burn I'll near the truth and reincarnate from ash. I am the dialogue of dreamers. I turned away from my body and my self to complete my first journey toward meaning, but meaning burned me and disappeared. I am absence. The heavenly and the expelled from "Mural

Yet you love sleep and salute Hypnos, the Greek god of sleep, and forget that he is death's brother.

A small café, that's love.

I love talking to you, even if I have nothing to say.

I will choose from my intimate memories what's fitting: the scent of wrinkled sheets after making love is the scent of grass after rain. — Mahmoud Darwish, from "Dense Fog Over The Bridge," If I Were Another: Poems . Translated by Fady Joudah. (Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 1 edition, October 27, 2009) Originally published 2009.

Thus, lethargic letters, which carry no value when separate, build a house when they come together.

They asked 'do you love her to death?' I said 'speak of her over my grave and watch how she brings me back to life.

Tu déchires des nuages et tu les envoies en direction du vent. Et alors? Il est des nuages très fertiles et cela requiert un sol approprié.

We see them oiling their weapons to kill the gryphon they think is hiding in our hen coop. And we cannot help laughing.

Everything around me looks like me and I look like nothing here

And writing is not enough for me to declare: I found my presence filling in absence and whenever I searched for myself I found others and whenever I searched for them I found only myself the stranger Am I a crowd of one?

She says: When are we gonna meet? I say: After a year and a war She says: When does the war end? I say: The time we meet

I am besieged by contradiction.

Don't tell the beloved, you are I and I am you, say the opposite of that: we are two guests of an excess, fugitive cloud.

Get rid of my tomorrow. Return my yesterday and leave us alone together. After you nothing leaves and nothing returns.

We find time for entertainment: we throw dice or flip throw our papers for news of yesterday's wounded, and read the horoscope column: In the year two thousand and two the camera smiles for those born in the sign of siege

From afar, the poems come. I resemble you, yet I do not become you. I become you, yet I do not resemble you.

Letters are restless, hungry for an image, and the image is thirsty for a meaning.

There is no desert in the memory I have of you And no enemies from now on for the rose That bursts forth from the ruins of your house!