Palestinian Poetry Blogging

Sonnet II

Perhaps you only ask for ambiguity when you turn your back to the river.
There an autumn sprinkles water onto a stag from a passing cloud.
There on what you left behind of the crumbs of your departure.
The Milky Way is your ambiguity, the dust of nameless stars.
Your ambiguity is a night in pearls lighting nothing but water.
As for speech, it can light the night of someone setting forth
between two odes and two rows of palms, with the single word: love

I am the one who saw his tomorrow when he saw you.
I am the one who saw gospels written by the last idolater,
on the slopes of Gilead before the old countries, and after.
I am the cloud returning to a fig tree which bears my name,
just as the sword bears the face of the slaughtered.
Perhaps when you turn your shadow to me, you bestow unto metaphor
the meaning of something that is about to happen.

Mahmoud Darwish from A Bed For the Stranger (1999)

Translated by Sinan Antoon and edited by Munir Akash and Carolyn Forché