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. 

Mahmoud Darwish