10 of the Best Mahmoud Darwish Poems Everyone Should Read

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

Mahmoud Darwish (1941-2008) is one of the greatest names in Palestinian literature. After publishing his first poetry collecting, Wingless Birds, when he was just 19 years old, Darwish went on to forge a formidable literary reputation.

He is now regarded as Palestine’s unofficial national poet, although this downplays his international reputation: he is one of the most widely read Arab poets around the world, whose work is at once accessible to the general reader and full of layered meanings and technical mastery. He is at once a modernist poet and a writer with a deep-engrained understanding of the tradition of Arabic poetry.

One of the recurring themes in Darwish’s poetry is the concept of a homeland, with the poet Naomi Shihab Nye describing him as ‘the essential breath of the Palestinian people, the eloquent witness of exile and belonging’.

Below, we select and introduce ten of Mahmoud Darwish’s greatest poems on these, and other, themes. Many of the poems are translated by Darwish’s great translator, Fady Joudah.

1. ‘In Jerusalem’.

This poem sees Darwish wandering around the holy city of Jerusalem, pondering what causes religious conflict – do wars, he asks, flare up from ‘a dimly lit stone’?

However, the overwhelming focus is on love and peace, with the speaker of the poem having something akin to an out-of-body experience as he walks – nay, flies – above the city, transfigured into another being.

2. ‘Diary of a Palestinian Wound’.

This 1969 poem is addressed to Darwish’s fellow Palestinian poet, Fadwa Tuqan, and is divided into 24 parts in the original version. Tuqan, like Darwish in this poem, had written a response to the Six-Day War with Israel in 1967.

In that war, the Arab armies had been defeated by Israeli forces; the poem reflects on the aftermath of this defeat, and the Palestinian resistance movement which arose in the wake of the war. As such, the themes of the poem include martyrdom, sacrifice, and resurrection (Jesus Christ, who had been sacrificed in Palestine nearly two millennia earlier, is present in the poem as a spectral figure).

3. ‘To a Young Poet’.

Taking a different view from T. S. Eliot, who emphasised the role of tradition in shaping a new poet, Darwish advises the ‘young poet’ in this poem to disregard the ‘outline’ inherited from previous poets (including Darwish himself).

Instead, the new aspiring poet should write as if they are either the first person ever to write poetry (thus breaking new ground by default) or the last poet who will ever do so (so they should make their poems matter).

After this arresting opening, Darwish goes on to offer a kind of ‘ars poetica’, or series of epigrammatic statements about what he thinks poetry should be: ‘deviate from the rule’ (again, there are no fixed rules or outlines for poetry which one must adhere to), poetry is ‘talent’ so all advice – including that offered by Darwish himself – should be taken with a pinch of salt.

4. ‘In Her Absence I Created Her Image’.

As the title of this poem suggests, absence can be a powerful source of poetic inspiration. Chasing the ‘mirage’ – an elusive will-o’-the-wisp that doesn’t have any tangible reality – is what the dreamer-poet does. But this is also a poem about the ways in which the past continues to haunt the present in spectral, half-glimpsed ways, to which the poet is singularly attuned.

5. ‘The Cypress Broke’.

Beginning with an epigraph from the Lebanese poet Bassam Hajjar (1955-2009), who described the cypress as the tree’s ‘grief’ and its ‘shadow’, this poem is about the fall of a cypress tree and the responses this event elicits from those who knew and observed it on a regular basis.

So a boy who used to draw the tree reflects on its appearance, and a girl remarks that the skyline appears to be ‘incomplete’ with the cypress gone; conversely, a young man thinks the sky has been rendered ‘complete’ now the cypress is out of the way. The poem can be interpreted as a meditation about change (and loss?) and how different people respond very differently to it.

6. ‘If I Were Another’.

This deeply symbolic poem uses the motif of the road, and taking a journey, to explore identity. By the end of the poem, the speaker has become dual or double: both himself, and transformed into another figure, the figure with whom he has been communing on the road as they make their journey together.

7. ‘Passport’.

This 1970 poem combines several of Darwish’s recurring tropes: the passport as a marker of identity, and the idea of a symbolic ‘wound’.

Darwish had an Israeli passport, but as a Palestinian he felt that this meant his true national identity had, in effect, been erased; the other kind of passport he used was not a ‘true’ passport at all, but merely identity papers given out by a host nation to Palestinian refugees.

8. ‘A Lover from Palestine’.

This short poem at once praises and idealises a Palestinian woman and, on some level, feminises the land of Palestine, viewing it as similar to a beautiful woman. It’s another poem of identity: everything, from the woman’s name to her clothing and her eyes, bear the stamp of her Palestinian origins.

Although it’s a poem of praise, this brief lyric might be regarded as another of Darwish’s ‘resistance poems’, given its underscoring of the woman as Palestinian throughout her life, right until her death, despite the events following the establishment of Israel in 1948 which rendered Palestinians a displaced and nationless people.

9. ‘To Our Land’.

‘Our land’ here is, of course, Darwish’s own Palestine, that land situated ‘near the word of god’, in the Holy Land. Once again we find Darwish’s preferred symbol, the wound, being used to describe Palestine, a land marked by absence, chasms, and other gaps and lacunae.

10. ‘Identity Card’.

We conclude with one of Mahmoud Darwish’s best-known poems, and one which helped establish him as a powerful resistance poet. ‘Identity Card’ appeared in Darwish’s second collection in 1964, and uses the recurring phrase, or refrain, ‘put it on record’, to outline the key facts of a person’s life.

But the poem’s other refrain, ‘What’s there to be angry about?’ may begin as a rhetorical question but, as the speaker lists the various causes for grievance he holds – his forefathers’ vineyards being taken from him, for instance – it emerges that this is another poem powerfully combining two of Darwish’s key preoccupations: identity and resistance.