Poetry

If poets and their art provide us with tools necessary for living, then Mahmoud Darwish may be the hammer and chisel in poetry’s chest, feared by some for his capacity to tear down the walls of comfortable myths, and lauded by others for...

Autumn and its thousand adjectives have come
to this, a swither in the trees,
their limbs bronchial and backlit in the gloam.

The land was ours before we were the land’s.
She was our land more than a hundred years
Before we were her people. She was ours

She is as in a field a silken tent
At midday when a sunny summer breeze
Has dried the dew and all its ropes relent

One misty evening, one another’s guide,
We two were groping down a Malvern side
The last wet fields and dripping hedges home.

Back out of all this now too much for us,
Back in a time made simple by the loss
Of detail, burned, dissolved, and broken off

The grade surmounted we were speeding high
Through level mountains nothing to the eye
But scrub oak, scrub oak and the lack of earth

The road at the top of the rise
Seems to come to an end
And take off into the skies.

Let the downpour roil and toil!
The worst it can do to me
Is carry some garden soil

Lord, I have loved your sky,
Be it said against or for me,
Have loved it clear and high