Friday 16 May 2014

Study - My Surburbia VI


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Study - My Suburbia V


Poem and Ravel




This road takes me; a horse guiding a horseman
A traveler like me cannot look back
I have walked far enough to know
where autumn begins:
there, behind the river,
the last pomegranates ripen
in an additional summer
and a beauty mark grows
in the seed of the apple
The road and I will sleep like partners
behind the river, beneath our shadows,
then rise at dawn and carry each other.
I will ask it: Why so fast?
Slow down, O horse saddled with seasons!
No matter how few our dreams
we will cross the desert and valleys
to reach the end at the beginning.
The beginning is behind us;
Before us, clouds bringing winter's tidings.
I have walked far enough to know
where winter starts:
there, over the hill
a gazelle looks for a fawn under the clouds.
A hunter points his rifle;
I will howl like a wolf
so the white gazelle can flee the fire
and the hunter is scared.
The road and I will sleep
there, next to a cave, over the hill,
then rise at dawn and carry each other
asking: What next? Where are you taking me?
I see the fog, but I don't see the road,
nor does it see me.
Have I arrived?
Or have I been separated from the road?
I asked myself, then said:
Now, from this distance,
a traveler like me
can look back! 
Mahmoud Darwish

Poem

And they don't ask: What comes after death?
Though more intimate with the book of Paradise
than with accounts of the earth, they're preoccupied
with another question: What shall we do
before this death? Near to life, we live
and we don't - as if life were parceled out
from a desert where the haggling gods of property
settle their disputes.
We live beside an ancient dust.
Our lives burden the historian's night:
'Though I make them disappear, they come back to me
from absence.'
Our lives burden the artist:
'I draw them and become one of them, veiled in mist.'
Our lives burden the General:
'How can a ghost still bleed?'
We shall be what we want to be. And we want
a bit of life, not for just anything - but to honor
the resurrection after our death.
Unintentionally, they speak the philosopher's words:
'Death means nothing to us: if we are then he isn't.
Death means nothing to us: if he is then we are not.'
And they have rearranged their dreams
and sleep standing. 

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