How We Hurt Ourselves
The Poetry of Najwan Darwish, Amplifying Voices for Peace.
Dear Friend,
I started this year of writing on an inner urging. But I do not want to say from where it came. This urge for peace is not a hobby. Nor is it an identity to wear and take off at the end of a long day. I do not want to say anymore about it because it is a call that must be answered. It makes me want to hide behind words. The final hiding place, the boundary between us. Where I end and you begin. Where is that? It’s nothing more than an idea. An idea of separation. As if our lives are not so intimately entwined that we find ourselves to be parts of one whole.
Holy.
It’s unreasonable to ask the false self to do itself in. For this, we need our poets. We need our holy ones, those who have gone before. Stars, reflecting the light within us.
Our technology teaches us that we are connected.
Did you believe that you think only your own thoughts?
Don’t you know this land was colonised?
‘Economics are the method; the object is to change the heart and soul’ - Margaret Thatcher
The false self stands in judgement.
One pillar of its economy founded on war.
Another on finance, fear and greed.
What is the inscription over the door of this temple?
If death reigns here then who’s land can it be?
Are we not waking in the land of the dead?
The poetry of Najwan Darwish will do the false self in.
From his collection of poems “Exhausted on the Cross.”
The last time I wrote poetry was three thousand years ago. Back then, I was a soldier in disguise, A soldier who didn’t know the war was over, and now here I am trying to write all over again. The dust of the years is like the dust of tombs. I emerge from the earth like a seed bursting, Like a bud unfurling on the branch, and like the dead who spread across a land only death inhabits. “A Poem by a Soldier in Disguise”, Najwan Darwish from “Exhausted on the Cross” published by NYRB/POETS You can buy a copy here - all proceeds go to support peace
“the soldier in the poem stopped writing poetry and went into hiding, not knowing the war had ended. Yet when the soldier stopped writing he failed to realise that love itself had also ended, and so he wakes up in a land overflowing with the dead…It has fallen to the poet to be the first victim to cross the land of the dead and of silence, and also to be the first one to rise up and tell us that despite everything new days will come.” Raul Zurita from the Foreword.
It’s possible to say to your loved ones, “This I will not accept from you.”
We must write of love, we must speak of it and we must live from love. No more must we be strangers to ourselves.
The edges of what is good we find together. So much suffering, it can never be healed by revenge.
Our thoughts
Our words.
Our actions make our worlds.
There was a time I filled notebooks with words. So many of them they have become an inconvenience. On shelves and in boxes, dragged around from home to home.
This year I will write here.
How long must we witness the insanity of human killing human?
Who can say.
Will we see an end to violence?
We will.
We will it.
Like a bud unfurling on the branch, seeds emerging from the earth.
Despite everything, new days will come.
In peace.
Till tomorrow.
Love
Mikey