Palestinian Poetry Blogging


We Have the Right to Love Autumn

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?
An autumn that blights its leaves with gold.
If only there were leaves on a fig tree, or even neglected meadow plants
that we may observe the season change!
If only we never said goodbye to the fundamentals
and questioned our fathers when they fled at knife point. May poetry and
God's name have mercy on us!
We have the right to the warm nights of beautiful women, and talk about what might shorten the nights of two strangers waiting for the North to reach the compass.
It's autumn, we have the right to smell autumn's fragrances and ask the night for a dream.
Does the dream, like dreamers themselves, sicken? Autumn. Autumn.
Can people be born on a guillotine?
We have the right to die any way we wish
May the earth hide itself away in a ear of wheat!

from Fewer Roses (1986) by Mahamoud Darwish

Translated by Munir Akash and Carolyn Forché