Mahmoud Darwish

And the girl is saved for a while

because a hazy hand

a divine hand of some sort helps her, so she calls out: ‘Father

Father! Let’s go home, the sea is not for people like us!’

The echo has no echo

so she becomes the endless scream in the breaking news

which was no longer breaking news

when

the aircraft returned to bomb a house with two windows and a door.

And today is better than tomorrow. But the dead are what’s new. They’re born every day and when they’re trying to sleep death takes them away from their drowsiness into a sleep without dreams.

Voices search for words in the open country, and the echo comes back clearly, woundingly: ‘There’s nobody here.’

The sky is leaden grey and the sea blue grey, but the colour of blood is hidden from the camera by swarms of green flies.

The call to prayer rises to accompany the indistinguishable funerals: coffins hastily raised in the air, hastily buried – no time to carry out the rites, more dead are arriving at speed from other raids, individually or in groups, or a whole family with no orphans or grieving parents left behind.

‘If it weren’t for my mysterious need for poetry, I wouldn’t need anything,’ says the poet, whose enthusiasm has waned so his mistakes have become less frequent.

The summer only rarely lends itself to verse. The summer is a prose poem which takes no interest in the eagles circling high above.

An autumnal summer on the hills is like a prose poem.

I would yearn for nothing

no yesterday passing, no tomorrow to come

and my present neither advancing nor retreating

Nothing happening to me!