Two Sonnets For Mahmoud Darwish

Dice From There: Two Sonnets for Mahmoud Darwish

(First Published in Brazen Head)

I. From There

It was Mahmoud, of all who sing and die,
Born in a nation's catastrophic dawn,

Who made a country look him in the eye.

He made me listen to him in Silwan

That day. I stank of grief and sweat and fear
Watching the men break down an old man's door
And son. I vomited. He tugged my ear
To tell me he had lived through this but more.

Through gas-grenades and prison and despair,
A people clutched at heart, to a death of one,
Under the sign of sacred dignity

He knew his Exodus. He came from there
To forge himself to song between the gun

And Rita. Anguish and humanity.

II. Who am I to say

Could he have been my friend, whose flowers weighed

Down on the gunsight's scales? I think. We both

Learned home in strangeness. Both our girlfriends made

Love in a Hebrew we refused to loathe.

Seeing him weary of the slow gun-play

Of sloganing, outgrow the lollipop

Of rhetoric and learn that where words stop

Could carry more than what we have to say,

I think how his verse plays in later years

At dice with histories he cannot master,

The struggle for a thing he vaguely fears,

Chased by the angry twilight of disaster

Across the longitudes from Galilee

To Texas. Anguish and humanity.