Skip to main content
Outdated Browser

For the best experience using our website, we recommend upgrading your browser to a newer version or switching to a supported browser.

More Information

Mahmoud Darwish, 1941-2008

Mahmoud Darwish is dead. The great poet of Palestinian displacement died in a Houston hospital after open-heart surgery. In a poem in his 2006 “Diary,” Darwish writes,

If you were told: you’re going to die here this evening

What would you do in the remaining time?

… I realize how my life

Is about to leave me to stay with the living here

And I do not question what will fill the gap.

At the beginning of the US invasion of Iraq, Darwish wrote, in the anguished Nothing but Iraq:

… Indeed, poetry is

tribulation

And exile

Twins … and we didn’t dream of more

than a life as life

and to die in our own way:

Iraq, Iraq, Nothing But Iraq.

English

Mahmoud Darwish is dead. The great poet of Palestinian displacement died in a Houston hospital after open-heart surgery. In a poem in his 2006 “Diary,” Darwish writes,

If you were told: you’re going to die here this evening

What would you do in the remaining time?

… I realize how my life

Is about to leave me to stay with the living here

And I do not question what will fill the gap.

At the beginning of the US invasion of Iraq, Darwish wrote, in the anguished Nothing but Iraq:

… Indeed, poetry is

tribulation

And exile

Twins … and we didn’t dream of more

than a life as life

and to die in our own way:

Iraq, Iraq, Nothing But Iraq.

Read Next