Palestinians bade an emotional farewell on Wednesday to their national poet Mahmoud Darwish, who was laid to rest on a hilltop overlooking the West Bank city of Ramallah.

Darwish died Saturday in Houston at age 67 after complications from open-heart surgery.

He was the first Palestinian to receive a state funeral since Yasser Arafat in 2004.

Darwish’s body was flown Wednesday from Jordan to Ramallah, where Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas received the flag-draped coffin.

Widely revered for giving voice to the Palestinians’ desire for independent statehood and their longing for the lands they lost to Israel, Darwish was seen off at his funeral by tens of thousands of political and cultural elite as well as ordinary Palestinians, who moved in a procession from a formal honor guard in the presidential compound to jostling crowds around his hillside gravesite.

“He was the master of the word and wisdom, the symbol who expressed our national feeling, our human constitution, our declaration of independence,” said Abbas in a speech.

Darwish was born in the village of Birweh, which was razed in the wake of the 1948 Israeli-Arab war.

He spent years in exile in Cairo, Beirut, Paris and the US after being stripped of his Israeli-Arab citizenship for being active in the Israeli Communist Party and the Palestine Liberation Organization as a young man.

He returned to Palestine when Israel gave him permission in the late 1990s — even then only to the occupied West Bank and Gaza.

Darwish famously penned Arafat’s speech to the United Nations in 1974 when the late Palestinian leader said, “I have come bearing an olive branch and a freedom fighter’s gun. Do not let the olive branch fall from my hand.”

He also wrote the largely symbolic 1988 Palestinian Declaration of Independence.

His work resonated across political and generational lines for his ability to express the Palestinian sense of loss, anger and defiance.

In later years, he became increasingly frustrated at the in-fighting between rival Palestinian factions Fatah and Hamas. Last year he condemned the explosion of violence between the two groups in Gaza as “a public attempt at suicide in the streets.”

IN MEMORIAM
 

I Come From There

            I come from there and I have memories

Born as mortals are, I have a mother

And a house with many windows,

I have brothers, friends,

And a prison cell with a cold window.

Mine is the wave, snatched by sea-gulls,

I have my own view,

And an extra blade of grass.

Mine is the moon at the far edge of the words,

And the bounty of birds,

And the immortal olive tree.

I walked this land before the swords

Turned its living body into a laden table.

 I come from there. I render the sky unto her mother

When the sky weeps for her mother.

And I weep to make myself known

To a returning cloud.

I learnt all the words worthy of the court of blood

So that I could break the rule.

I learnt all the words and broke them up

To make a single word: Homeland…..

My Mother

I long for my mother’s bread

My mother’s coffee

Her touch

Childhood memories grow up in me

Day after day

I must be worth my life

At the hour of my death

Worth the tears of my mother.

And if I come back one day

Take me as a veil to your eyelashes

Cover my bones with the grass

Blessed by your footsteps

Bind us together

With a lock of your hair

With a thread that trails from the back of your dress

I might become immortal

Become a God

If I touch the depths of your heart.

If I come back

Use me as wood to feed your fire

As the clothesline on the roof of your house

Without your blessing

I am too weak to stand.

I am old

Give me back the star maps of childhood

So that I

Along with the swallows

Can chart the path

Back to your waiting nest.