POEM: The Earth Is Closing On Us, Mahmoud Darwish, 1995

Editors, The Black Agenda Review

23 Oct 2024

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“Where should we go after the last frontiers? Where should the birds fly after the last sky?”

We are at a loss for words. We have lost all language. What words can describe the horrors and sorrows of a genocide, unremittingly live streamed, that has continued for more than a year? What language can convey the warped and barbaric white supremacist logics that justify the industrial massacre of more than 200,000 people, including the cruel starvation of entire families and the savage dismembering of children, of infants? What language can explain the ethnic cleansing of more than a million people from their lands, their homeland? Words have failed. Language has disintegrated. We are left with nothing more coherent than a clotted knar of grief and rage.

Once again, only the poets can respond to this state of aphasia. Only the poets can find the words beyond words, the language beyond language that can capture the holocaust, this apocalypse of the Palestinians, this fetid planet at its civilizational nadir. We are grateful, then, for the words of the late Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish (13 March 1941 – 9 August 2008), whose lines have long borne eloquent witness to the suffering of his people, and who has given the world the ledger of grief from which can be written a history of resistance, and of victory. Without further comment, we reprint Mahmoud Darwish’s immortal poem, “The Earth Is Closing In On Us.”

The Earth Is Closing In On Us

Mahmoud Darwish

The Earth is closing on us
pushing us through the last passage
and we tear off our limbs to pass through.
The Earth is squeezing us.
I wish we were its wheat
so we could die and live again.
I wish the Earth was our mother
so she'd be kind to us.
I wish we were pictures on the rocks
for our dreams to carry as mirrors.
We saw the faces of those who will throw
our children out of the window of this last space.
Our star will hang up mirrors.
Where should we go after the last frontiers?
Where should the birds fly after the last sky?
Where should the plants sleep after the last breath of air?
We will write our names with scarlet steam.
We will cut off the hand of the song to be finished by our flesh.
We will die here, here in the last passage.
Here and here our blood will plant its olive tree.

Palestine

Gaza

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