Darwish’s love poetry before the mid-nineties was dedicated to his homeland.
However, he subsequently started to write pure love poetry in a number of his collections as shown in the two poems below.
4.3.1 Low Sky
The poem’s title in Arabic is ﺔﺿﻔﺧﻧﻣ ٌءﺎﻣﺳ and it appeared for the first time in the collection ﺔﺑﯾرﻐﻟا رﯾرﺳ The Stranger’s Bed, a book of love poems, in 1998. This collection contains 29 poems, but none of them has the same title as that of the collection. In English, the collection appeared in 2007 in the volume The Butterfly’s Burden, a bilingual Arabic-English edition. This volume contains two other collections. The first is A State of Siege, written in 2002 as Darwish’s response to the second Intifada (the Palestinian uprising against Israeli occupation – a period of Israeli-Palestinian violence.
It started in September 2000, when Ariel Sharon made a visit to theTemple Mount,
seen by Palestinians as highly provocative). The second is Don’t Apologize for What You’ve Done, a book of short lyrics, in 2003. It is noticeable that all the three volumes in this book were written after Darwish’s return to Ramallah in the West Bank, where he found himself again in ‘internal’ exile.
This book is apparently named after the poem ﺔﺷارﻔﻟا رﺛأ The Butterfly’s Effect, which appeared in the volumeشطﻌﻟانﻣتوﻣﯾ ٌرﮭﻧ A River Dies of Thirst. The front cover is the painting Start of Love by Tayseer Barakat (Darwish 2007, back cover). The name of the painting is compatible with the content of the poems in the book, particularly the ones in the collection The Stranger’s Bed. The painting itself looks like Picasso’s Guernica about the Spanish civil war in the 1930s. This form can also be related to the 2007 Palestinian war within, addressed in a few poems in the book. The back cover has a photo of the author along with a brief biography of him. The second cover of the same book is dark blue, and it has a white leaf, with parts of its two sides eaten by a butterfly. The effect of the butterfly is hardly visible, but it is there. Fady Joudah translated this book.
The poem itself is about love and its various types as the poet sees them: estranged, small, poor, surrendering, one-sided, serene, two-sided, passing, and contemplative. In this poem, Darwish insists that love always exists. The poem opens with a depiction of love as a human being who has two silken feet to walk on. It is estranged, but happy.
When it gets wet through a passing rain shower, it gives giftsto passersby. It is a big love whose gifts are food and wine. This love is so soaring that its limit is the sky. The poet himself is also soaring in his imagination of love. He asks his beloved to wait for him to bring her jasmine and a green-tailed bird.
A poor love is staring at the river. It has surrendered and is probably hopeless, watching the seahorse that will be sucked down by the sea. The poet again addresses his beloved: were you, unlike the sea here, like two safe banks for me? Do you think that, unlike the seahorse, I found safety and happiness in your love? Did you love that place where we used to meet? Are you still thirsty for love? Do you long for our love?
Or do you think of love as a time that has passed forever?
Darwish tells the beloved that one-sided love is not real, though it may exist. It is not enough to penetrate your feelings and warm your bed. It is just an apprehension that
you imagine; you may cry because of it, but you will not sense it. When you embrace yourself between your arms, you do not know your real feelings. You may dream, but you are not sure of the taste and colour of nights that you prefer.
Two-sided love gives hope and joy. It lifts up the lovers’ feelings to the peak. Darwish asks the lady to share her love with the one she loves. Tell me about the time that you like so that I become the poet laureate of it. This is the nature of love poets: whenever a woman has secrets about love, there must be a poet to talk about her thoughts.
Similarly, whenever a poet delves into himself, he finds women in love as topics for his poems. Even if you chose exile, we will go together.
Finally, Darwish insists that there may be a love, passing through us, without us noticing. With the effect of this love, a rose in an ancient wall makes us fugitives and makes a girl at the bus stop laugh and cry. This love contemplates the passersby to choose the youngest among them. He addresses love: if you remain alone, you will not be soaring, but will only need a low sky. Be my friend and the sky will expand for both of us to soar, along with our imagination. The poem closes with ‘there is a love...’ to reassert the existence of love and to keep the door open for more kinds of love.
4.3.2 She Does Not Love You
The poem’s title in Arabic isتﻧأ كﺑﺣﺗ ﻻ ﻲھ and it appeared in دﻌﺑأ وأ زوﻠﻟارھزﻛ , which was translated into English by Mohammad Shaheen in 2009 as Almond Blossom and Beyond. The diversity of the poems in this book reveals both the beautiful aspects of life as viewed by Darwish and the substance of mankind as a whole through his relations with himself and with others.
Chapters one to four include short poems of nearly one page in length each. Chapter One is entitled ‘You’, and Darwish is obviously addressing an unknown person directly through using the pronoun ‘you’. The addressee, in fact, can be any other man or denote the poet himself. Chapter Two is entitled ‘He’. Here Darwish uses the pronoun
‘he’ and talks to an absent person who could be a real absentee or again the poet himself. Chapter Three is ‘I’ and most of the titles of the poems there start with the first person pronoun ‘I’. The protagonist is undoubtedly the poet himself. The poems in this chapter could constitute an autobiography of the poet. Chapter Four is about love and women. Chapters five to eight on the other hand include relatively long poems,
and they have the titles ‘exile 1’, ‘exile 2’, ‘exile 3’, and ‘exile 4’ respectively. They mirror Darwish’s long experience in exile and show his views about the nature of people and the essence of life.
In this poem, Darwish indicates that the beloved does not love him as a person, but as a poet. She is thrilled by strong and beautiful language and taken by the metaphors he uses. She is fond of and possessed by the poet, and consequently regards him as her poet or her hero rather than her lover. She likens the plunging of the rhythm in his poetry to a river, and thus he wants to become a river to gain her love. In addition, she is thrilled by the union of lightning and sound in his rhyme, and her lips moisten when she listens to his poetry. Consequently, he thinks of giving more readings to excite her.
The poet argues that this woman seems to prefer a romantic relationship. She is excited by the elevation of things from light to sound and finally to feelings. She is also happy with the struggle of night with her breasts. She addresses love saying: “Oh love, you have tortured me. I feel you flowing and pouring your sensuality outside my room.
Bless me with lust. Otherwise, I will kill you.” The poet says that he will be an angel, not to impress her, but so that she may kill him to avenge her femininity and escape the snare of his poetry.