"road is long, so dream of seven women"
May you have a day free from fear.
May you feel peace in your lungs, and share it.
May you receive a stranger’s admiring gaze.
Abdel Nasser Amer, 2015, Gaza, Palestine
We Travel Like All People
by Mahmoud Darwish
We travel like everyone else, but we return to nothing. As if travel were
a path of clouds. We buried our loved ones in the shade of clouds and
between roots of trees.
We said to our wives: Give birth for hundreds of years, so that we may end
this journey
within an hour of a country, within a meter of the impossible!
We travel in the chariots of the Psalms, sleep in the tents of the prophets,
and are born again in the language of Gypsies.
We measure space with a hoopoe's beak, and sing so that distance may forget us.
We cleanse the moonlight. Your road is long, so dream of seven women to bear
this long journey on your shoulders. Shake the trunks of palm trees for them.
You know the names, and which one will give birth to the Son of Galilee.
Ours is a country of words: Talk. Talk. Let me rest my road against a stone.
Ours is a country of words: Talk. Talk. Let me see an end to this journey.
from Unfortunately, It Was Paradise (translated and edited by Munir Akash and Carolyn Forche (with Sinan Antoon and Amira El-Zein)
Creative Invitations
1
Look around your home for a piece of visual art you’ve kept for a long time. Look at it carefully, closely, anew. Turn it upside down, sideways. Now, describe it on paper as if to someone who is not here, who cannot see it. Tell them why you have it: why is this image, of all the images in the world, the one in your hand?
2
Alternatively, try a reverse ekphrastic. Choose a single line from the poem by Mahmoud Darwish, above, that moves you. Draw in response to it.