Creative Non-Fiction

A River Dies of Thirst by Mahmoud Darwish

The preface by Ruth Padel told much about the poet, Mahmoud Darwish, his  origins from Lebanon, then going to Israel as a Pakistani.  We all know what that must have been like.  In many brief prose poems , he writes so movingly, if often understatedly of the attacks on Beirut and in Palestine.  Many of his poems are so personal, revealing the shocking pain of a man of peace, not only being unwelcome in the territory (A Shameful Land) but of the actual attacks, sometimes painfully graphically.  The title poem, A River Dies of Thirst, tells the sad story of the river that had two banks and “a heavenly mother who nursed it on drops from the clouds”, “descending from mountain peaks” but “they kidnapped its mother” so it ran short of water and died, slowly of thirst”.

These are poems written with such love of the lands, the sea, the wind, and yet as he has to move from place to place the killers come.  In the enemy “they are one being, distributed over different pieces of hardware, pressing electronic buttons.  He sees us but we don’t see him not because he’s a ghost but because he’s a steel mask on an idea—he is featureless, eyeless, ageless, and nameless.  It is he who has chosen to have a single name: the enemy”.

The last line, “written in green ink:  An apple fell on me from the clouds, and I knew my imagination was a faithful hunting dog.”

In “the house as casualty houses are killed like their inhabitants.”  The memory of objects is killed” and he lists the hundreds, thousands of every-day objects as vital documents we have to prove our existence.

This collection of poems, his list apparently is made of many textures—light, heavy, blissful, heartbroken, enormity, and trivial, all conveying the heart and truth of his gifted poet.

Poem re: “the list of objects killed” in which he lists hundreds, thousands of every-day objects as ‘vital documents we have to prove our existence’:

Not letting yourself mourn all your ‘things’ but would push that aside, reminding myself to thank God that my girls were unharmed, physically.  They survived what really was attempted murder.  How could I mourn majolica platters, heavy multicolored glass tumblers, silver coffee service, Venetian glass lamps, most of all the firm, ample upholstered breast of the Chippendale sofa into which I wept so many tears of pain, rejection, desolation at having no one to turn to.