As a part of its continuing effort to share a portion of the literary wealth of Arabic poetry with the English reader, The Arab American News translates a poem by the legendary Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish. 

By Mahmoud Darwish

Do not write history as poetry, for the weapon

of the historian does not suffer the trembling 

of cold, if it names the victims,

and does not listen to the tail of the guitar.

History is the diaries of weapons,

written on our bodies.

(The smart, clever one is the powerful)

And history has no emotion 

for us to feel nostalgia to our

beginnings, and no destination to know the front

from the back… and no breaks on

the railroads for us to bury the dead and gaze

at what time has done to us there,

and what we have done to time, 

as if we are from it and outside of it.

It is not logical or instinctive to break

what has remained of our fiction on the happy era.

Neither is it fictional for us to agree to live on the doors

of resurrection. It is inside and outside of us… and a mad

repetition from the slingshot to the atomic bomb.

It makes us and we make it, for no purpose…

Was history not born the way we wanted

because the human being never was?

Philosophers and artists walked through here,

and poets wrote the diaries of violets

and walked through here… And the poor

believed news about the Heaven

and waited here…

Gods came to rescue nature from our divinity

and walked through here.

And history has no time for contemplation.

History has no mirror and a visible face.

It is unrealistic reality,

or non-fictional fiction, so don’t write it.

Don’t write it as poetry. 

— Translated from Arabic by Ali Harb