| ROBERT PINSKY: Here
are two poems from the Middle East, one by an Arab and one by an Israeli.
The poems are not different in feeling from what other sources give us.
But they fulfill poetry's ability to crystallize feeling in a way more
memorable, more nuanced, more haunting, than other kinds of language.
First, a poem by the Palestinian Mahmoud Darwish, as translated from
the Arabic by Tania Nasir:
I AM FROM THERE
I come from there and remember, I was born like everyone is born, I
have a mother
and a house with many windows,
I have brothers, friends and a prison.
I have a wave that sea-gullls snatched away.
I have a view of my own and an extra blade of grass.
I have a moon past the peak of words.
I have the godsent food of birds and an olive tree beyond the ken of
time.
I have traversed the land before swords turned bodies into banquets.
I come from there. I return the sky to its mother when for its mother
the
sky cries, and I weep for a returning cloud to know me.
I have learned the words of blood-stained courts in order to break the
rules.
I have learned and dismantled all the words to construct a single one:
Home
And here is a passage from "Jerusalem, 1967," a poem by
the late Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai, as translated by Chana Bloch and
Stephen Mitchell:
From "Jerusalem 1967"
Always beside ruined houses and iron girders
twisted like the arms of the slain, you find
someone who is sweeping the paved path
or tending the little garden, sensitive
paths, square flower-beds,
Large desires for a horrible death are well cared-for
as in the monastery of the White Brothers next to the Lions' Gate.
But farther on, in the courtyard, the earth gapes:
columns and arches supporting the vain land
and negotiating with one another: crusaders and guardian angels,
a sultan and Rabbi Yehuda the Pious. Arched vaults with a
column, ransom for prisoners, and strange conditions in rolled-up
contracts, and sealing-stones. Curved hooks holding air.
Capitals and broken pieces of columns scattered like chessmen
in a game that was interrupted in anger,
and Herod, who already, two thousand years ago, wailed
like mortar-shells. He knew.
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