Mahmoud Darweesh: A State of Siege by S. Rami

The Palestinian Poet Mahmoud Darweesh wrote his last poem “A State of Siege” on
January 2002, in Ramallah, the political capital of the Palestinian National Authority since
1994.
Darweesh was born March 13, 1941, in Alberweh village near the city of Acre, Palestine.
He left with his family after Jewish terrorist gangs stormed his village. After spending one
year in Lebanon the family managed to return to Palestine. His first batch of poems
appeared 1960 under the title “ Sparrows Without Wings”

Successive poems appeared while our poet was spending his days between Israeli
prisons and home arrest. In the year 1970 he went to college in Moscow where thousands
of Palestinian students furthered their education. But Darweesh decided not to go back to
his village, one of few lucky Palestinian localities that the nascent Jewish state did not
erased along with other 450 villages turned to rubbles.

Cairo was Darweesh next stop and the Beirut where settled down and issued Alkarmel
Magazine. Again, the poet was forced to leave Beirut along with other Palestine Liberation
Organization’s members in the aftermath of the Israeli Army storming the first Arab capital
to be occupied by the Israelis.

Mahmoud Darweesh kept jetting between Arab and European cities; writing poetry in all
circumstances.

The Palestinian poet rejected “Oslo Accords” and resigned his membership in the PLO,
but returned to Palestine in 1996 and settled down in Ramallah.

Darweesh’s important works were: “ A Lover from Palestine” 1966, “ I Love You or I Don’t
Love You” 1971, “Attempt Number 7” 1973, “ That’s her Picture … and that The Lover’s Suicide” 1975, “ Praising the Supreme Shadow”1983, “ Siege of the Sea’s
Praises” 1984, “Less Roses” 1986, “ It Is a Song…It Is a Song” 1987, “ I See What I Want “
1988, “ Eleven Planets” 1992, “ Why You Let the Horse Alone?” 1995, “ The Bed of the
Stranger (Woman) 1999.

Among his prose writings: “Diaries of Usual Sadness” 1973, “Something About the
Homeland” 1975, “ A Memory for Forgetness” 1986 and a “In Describing Our Predicament”
1987.

“ A State of Siege” is his latest work; it is a long poem written in Ramallah, Jan. 2002.
Excerpts from “ A State of Siege”: -
Here, near the slopes of the hills, ahead of sunset
And the mouth of time,
Near orchards of truncated shadows,
Doing what the prisoners are doing:
Raising hopes.

A land ready for the dawn,
We became less intelligent,
Because we stare at the clock of victory:
No night in our artillery-sprinkled night
And our enemies are torching light for us
In the darkness of the gloomy callers

He says at the edge of death:
No foothold of loss was left on me,
Free I am near my freedom
And my tomorrow in my hand…
I’ll enter, little while, my life
And born again free without parents,
And I’ll choose for my name letters from the Lapis Lazuli

You who are standing on the steps come in,
And have Arabic coffee with us
(You may feel that you are humans like us)
You who are standing on the steps come in,
Get out from our mornings,
We are assured then that we are
Humans like you!
And find time for amusement:
To play dice like you, or thumbing our news
In wounded yesterday’s papers,
And read our horoscope: in year
Two thousands and two, the camera smiles
To the Zodiac of Siege’s birthdays

Every death,
However expected,
Is the first death
Then how can I see
A moon
Sleeping underneath of every stone?