Yannis Ritsos
By Kazim Ali
"Athens was welcoming to those who had come from the sea."
Mahmoud Darwish
Yannis, you held him in the glare of the diamonded sea,
unteaching him his practical mantra of liberation,
seeing in him a son to take care of you in your loneliness,
loneliness varnished by your detention
in the house made of flower stems that thrust
through the rocks in the prison-yard, its roof made
of the unscannable lines of rain. You revealed to him
the sound of the rusty-hinged door, how it would swing
sadly open and reveal no homeland beyond at all.
He came from the sea dragging his anklets of keys.
Did you teach him then how the old locks and houses
of his hometown were already all broken?
Yannis, in the end he rinsed the last of the coast road's
dust from his body after a lifetime of pressing his language
into lines of poetry and prayer and prestidigitation,
tired of praising mosques in which he could not pray.
The same morning I was forbidden by the guard to pray
at the Mosque of Cordoba, he woke up in Houston,
Texas and went to a mall food court to meet for the first and last time
his translator. The words they spoke to one another
were the same as those I saw in stone fragments
on the floor of the archeological dig at Madinat az-Zahra,
the ruined capital of the West looking East toward
the cities left behind. That city had remained buried
in a field for a thousand years. The palace and throne room
had been torn apart, the rubble of the mosaics
now being painstakingly reassembled piece by piece,
unlike the villages of Palestine, disassembled down to stone.
Yannis, what did you say to him that blue afternoon when the stone
canoe landed and he arrived in another place that would be home and
not-home? In Cordoba, meanwhile, the story of his death flashed
across the morning news, scrolling along the screen from clay to nothing.
But let's let the sea have the last word, the sea he crossed to come
to you, or the one that sparkled off the coast of Chile when he,
in Neruda's house, remembered you or the sea that rained
lightly down as the poet and his translator huddled together
over cheap mall coffee to converse, in Texas of all places,
though it could have been Athens, or Palestine, or Neruda's house,
at least as good as any mosque in the world,
so long as there was coffee and poetry and the sound of rain,
rain in the shape of the river, rain in the shape of a broken lock,
rain in the shape of long-since written verses, while the translator
of lost homelands makes from the sound of butterfly wings
rain in the shape of the dark furnace of days.
From Inquisition (2018)
Wesleyan University Press
The Horse Fell Off the Poem
By Mahmoud Darwish
Translated by Fady Joudah
The horse fell off the poem
and the Galilean women were wet
with butterflies and dew,
dancing above chrysanthemum
The two absent ones: you and I
you and I are the two absent ones
A pair of white doves
chatting on the branches of a holm oak
No love, but I love ancient
love poems that guard
the sick moon from smoke
I attack and retreat, like the violin in quatrains
I get far from my time when I am near
the topography of place ...
There is no margin in modern language left
to celebrate what we love,
because all that will be ... was
The horse fell bloodied
with my poem
and I fell bloodied
with the horse’s blood ...
Mahmoud Darwish, "The Horse Fell Off the Poem" from The Butterfly’s Burden. Copyright © 2008 by Mahmoud Darwish, English translation by Fady Joudah. Source: The Butterfly’s Burden (Copper Canyon Press, 2007)
Absence
By Yannis Ritsos
In our hands we hold the shadow of our hands.
The night is kind―the others do not see us holding our shadow.
We reinforce the night. We watch ourselves.
So we think better of others.
The sea still seeks our eyes and we are not there.
A young girl buttons up her love in her breast
and we look away smiling at the great distance.
Perhaps high up, in the starlight, a skylight opens up
that looks out on the sea, the olive trees and the burnt houses—
We listen to the butterfly gyrating in the glass of All Souls’ Day,
and the fisherman’s daughter grinding serenity in her coffee-
grinder.
Published in August-September 1970 issue of Poetry Magazine
