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Darwish's 2008 poem, "To Our Land," is a love letter to Palestine from exile. Technically, the audience is Palestine itself--it is written to the levant, the fertile crescent, the Holy Land, the cradle of civilization, and to Darwish, his lost home. But more broadly speaking, the target audience is everyone; the poem is a portrayal of the Palestinian plight, and while it gives a voice to displaced Palestinians themselves, I see it as more directed towards those who are unfamiliar with or unsympathetic to Palestinian suffering. In this poem, they can identify with Darwish, see what he sees in the Palestine he presents, and feel the "loss" or exile as keenly as he does.

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The speaker is an Arab woman, likely a housewife and mother. Her life is one of domesticity and simplicity; she does not accomplish great or grand things and her name is not remembered by history. Wars and foreign affairs and social movements mean nothing to her because her life remains the same, spinning wool and making beds and gardening and cleaning; her life is her husband and her love for him.

*It's important to note that this poem, as beautifully as it is written, is written by a man, and is condescending and sexist; it portrays the nameless woman as "less," as an inferior, as someone who lives for a man rather than for herself.

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This poem is about Palestine; how, in Darwish's absence from his home and his land, he built in his mind a "mirage," a heaven on earth, and that is what makes him, and other Palestinians remain "steadfast" to the memory of Palestine.

The title is significant because it is so broad and so simple. It could mean a woman as much as it could mean a country; it is left to the reader to interpret what is absent and what is idealized in that absence. The reader builds the image in their head before they even read the poem. All the reader feels is the loss, the "absence," and the memory, the hope, without knowing the subject.

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"And a girl said: The sky today

is incomplete because the cypress broke.

And a young man said: But the sky today is complete

because the cypress broke. And I said

to myself: Neither mystery nor clarity,

the cypress broke, and that is all

there is to it: the cypress broke!"

This verse of the poem is powerful because it again shows how truth is subjective, how we see the world in different ways and what is beautiful changes in the eye of each person looking. To her, the cypress made the sky perfect; to him, the cypress ruined it. And while it's cliche to say "beauty is in the eye of the beholder," I think this line is more powerful because Darwish never explicitly states that, or some other grand, condescending philosophy; he just says that some found the tree beautiful and some did it not, but the only unchangeable truth is that the tree was there, and then it was gone.

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Peter Mitchell, "How Many Aunties?", Leeds, 1970s

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"A stranger on the riverbank, like the river ... water

binds me to your name. Nothing brings me back from my faraway

to my palm tree: not peace and not war. Nothing

makes me enter the gospels. Not

a thing ... nothing sparkles from the shore of ebb

and flow between the Euphrates and the Nile. Nothing

makes me descend from the pharaoh’s boats. Nothing

carries me or makes me carry an idea: not longing

and not promise. What will I do? What

will I do without exile, and a long night

that stares at the water?"

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I chose Mahmoud Darwish because I wanted to read a poet who challenged me, who forced me to look at the world through a different perspective. I find Darwish's poetry beautiful, but I sometimes struggle to read it because his worldview, and particularly his views of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (which most of his poetry is centred around) in contrast to my own views. However, I think you grow most as a reader, writer, and as a person when you force yourself to be open-minded, to read that which you disagree with, and realize that experience–and truth–will change with every person, and that doesn't necessarily make it wrong. Truth is subjective.