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.

In this poem, Darwish addresses the violence in the Levant, urging the “disarmed” Canaanites to adopt wheat as their eternal army. The poem repeatedly states that the lover bled anemone, wild flowers native to the Mediterranean region. “The water flowed red in the veins of our spring,” writes Darwish, who died in 2008, as if he is describing the current bloodshed across the Middle East. 

The lover bled anemone,

The land of murex shined with its wounds,

Its first song: The blood of love that was shed by the gods

And its last is blood…

Celebrate the spring of your land, 

People of Canaan, and burn

like its flowers.

Oh disarmed people of Canaan,

Be complete.

You are fortunate that you chose agriculture as a profession.

You are unfortunate that you chose fields 

Close to the border of God,

Where the sword writes the autobiography of clay…

Let the ears of wheat be your eternal army

And eternity be the hunting dogs.

And let the harts be free,

Like a pastoral poem… 

The lover bled anemone,

So the boulders of the hill blanched

From the pain of the hard travail

And they turned red

And the water flowed red in the veins of our spring…

Our first song is the blood of love that

was spilled by the gods.

And our last is blood spilled by the gods of steel.

— Translated by Ali Harb