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CELEBRATING A PALESTINIAN POET AND PATRIOT
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Almost one year ago the great Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish died. Not only was he the voice of Palestinian suffering but his imagination and eloquence placed him among the world's great contemporary poets. In describing an almond blossom he was describing his exiled homeland rising above its agony and reclaiming its magnificence: Allen L Roland
Rising from the ghettos and anguish of Palestine a voice emerged, like a spring almond blossom, and it carried the hopes of its oppressed people on the gentle winds of his verse.
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To Describe an Almond Blossom
Mahmoud Darwish
" To Describe an almond blossom no encyclopedia of flowers is any help to me, no dictionary.
Words carry me off to snares of rhetoric that wound the sense, and praise the wound they've made.
Like a man telling a woman her own feeling.
How can the almond blossom shine in my own language, when I am but an echo ?
It is translucent, like liquid laughter that has sprouted on boughs out of the shy dew...
light as a musical phrase ...
weak as the glance of a thought that peaks out from our fingers as in vain we write it ...
dense as a line of verse not arranged alphabetically.
To describe an almond blossom, I need to make visits to the unconscious, which guides me to affectionate names hanging on trees.
What is its name ?
What is the name of this thing in the poetics of nothing ?
I must break out of gravity and words, in order to feel their lightness when they turn into whispering ghosts, and I make them as they make me, a white translucent.
Neither homeland or exile are words, but passions of whiteness in the description of the almond blossom.
Neither snow or cotton.
One wonders how it rises above things and names.
If a writer were to compose a successful piece describing an almond blossom, the fog would rise from the hills, and people, all the people, would say:
This is it.
These are the words of our national anthem. "
Mahmoud Darwish, born in 1941 in the village of al-Birweh, Palestine, was the author of over two dozen volumes of poetry and prose. When he died in the summer of 2008, he was mourned throughout the world as a voice of the Palestinian people ~ author of their official declaration of independence and, most importantly, a poet of the highest invention and beauty.
Allen L Roland
Freelance Alternative Press Online columnist and psychotherapist Allen L Roland is available for comments, interviews, speaking engagements and private consultations ( allen@allenroland.com )
Allen L Roland is a practicing psychotherapist, author and lecturer who also shares a daily political and social commentary on his web log and website allenroland.com He also guest hosts a monthly national radio show TRUTHTALK on www.conscioustalk.net
Painting is Van Gogh's Almond Blossom
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