Today, I want to share with you a small poem from Mahmoud Darwish, the wonderful Palestinian poet, from the book above, ‘A river died of thirst.’
In his poem ‘The Essence of a Poem,’ Darwish says this:
“All beautiful poetry is an act of resistance.”
– Mahmoud Darwish, The Essence of a Poem
Yesterday, amid the many statistics of death in Gaza, we heard the news of the killing, one by one, of 15 emergency workers from Red Crescent, the UN and the fire service as they tried to reach injured people. The bodies and broken vehicles were then bulldozed into a hole. The only way things like this can be done by humans to humans is if they start to see each other as not human. Perhaps poetry is one of the ways that we re-humanise. If so, let us reach for poetry.
Here is Darwish’s poem ‘If it were not for sin’:
If It Were Not for Sin, by Mahmoud Darwish
It is not as Adam Thought!
If it were not for sin
If it were not for the descent to earth
The discovery of misery
And the temptation of Eve
If it were not for the longing for a lost paradise
There would be no poetry
Nor memory
And eternity would be no consolation.
