The poet Mahmoud Darwish believed there needed to be a time gap between an event and the writing about it. My thoughts about this latest dare are like “cotton ginned by the wind.” Maybe I need a wider gap.
I’ve sat most of this past week in “A State of Siege,” a long text found in The Butterfly’s Burden in which Darwish gave voice to the Israeli siege of Ramallah, his home (but not his home) in 2002, the year my oldest granddaughter was born. He called it, “a poet’s journal that deals with resisting the occupation through searching for beauty in poetics and beauty in nature. It was a way of resisting military violence through poetry. The victory of the permanent, the everlasting, the eternal, over the siege and the violence.”
Here, by the downslope of hills, facing the sunset
and time’s muzzle,
near gardens with severed shadows,
we do what the prisoners do,
and what the unemployed do;
we nurture hope.
Last night I glanced across the field toward my daughter’s house to see if her lights were on. It’s still my habit, even though for almost four months the house has existed only as a burned-out, soot-filled shell, the insides an eerie nether world where time stands still . . .
Join me over at Tweetspeak Poetry where I share more about my journey with Mahmoud Darwish and my Follow Your Dream Dare.
In what circumstances do you find yourself where you can still nurture hope?
In the stillness,
Sandy
