Good Bye Mahmud Darwish , Hope of an Independant Palestine Died with you

Will the American Media Cover this ?


The poet Mahmoud Darwish was the voice of the Palestinian odyssey, whose stark writing reflected the desperation and alienation of the Palestinian people. He published more than 20 collections of poetry, which have been translated into many languages (although few of them into English), and was the Arab world's best-selling poet. His poems are engraved in the hearts of millions of Palestinians and his words have been shouted by anti-occupation demonstrators in the streets of Ramallah, Damascus and Cairo. Many have been set to music, including "I yearn for my mother's bread."

They fettered his mouth with chains,
And tied his hands to the rock of the dead.
They said: You're a murderer.
They took his food, his clothes and his banners,
And threw him into the well of the dead.
They said: You're a thief.
They threw him out of every port,
And took away his young beloved.
And then they said: You're a refugee.


But his poetry also contained irony and a universal humanity. For Darwish the issue of Palestine became a prism for an internationalist feeling. The land and history of Palestine was a summation of millennia, with influences from Canaanites, Hebrews, Greeks, Romans, Ottoman Turks and British. Throughout all this has survived a core identity of Palestine. He was able to see the Israeli soldier as a victim of circumstances like himself. He expresses the bureaucratic absurdities of an oppressive military occupation.

I’ll beget you and you’ll beget me,
and very slowly I’ll remove the fingers of the dead from your body,
the buttons of their shirts and their birth certificates.
You’ll take the letters of your dead to Jerusalem.
We’ll wipe the blood from our glasses, my friend,
so we can reread Kafka,
and open two windows onto a street of shadows.

My outside is inside me;
don’t believe winter smoke.
Soon April will emerge from our dreams.
My outside is inside me;
pay no attention to statues.
An Iraqi girl will decorate her dress
with the first almond flowers,
and along the top edge of the arrow
drawn just above her name
she’ll write your name’s initial letter
in Iraq’s wind.

We find a lots of voices of dissent including Alexander Solzhenitsyn passing away . Is the age of reason over ?

We witnessed the death of a concupiscent Poet who fought the west , who fought for the fist-less.
We see no end in sight of the suffering of the Palestinian refugees . Should the Unpeople( to borrow a term form a British Historian ) succumb without a fight ?