Mahmoud Darwish: ‘Till my End and Till Its End’

Each Mahmoud Darwish Day (March 13), share new work by or about Darwish (March 13, 1941 – August 9, 2008), one of the great poets of the twentieth century.

Till My End and Till Its End

By Mahmoud Darwish

Translated by Marilyn Hacker

Are you tired of walking

My son, are you tired?

— Yes, Papa

Your night stretches out on the road

And my heart spills on the earth of your night.

— You’ve always been agile as a cat!

Climb on my shoulders

And we’ll take a shortcut through

The last forest of terebinth and oak

Galilee is to the north of us

And Lebanon behind us

And all the sky is ours from Damascus

To the beautiful walls of Acre

— And after that?

— We’ll go home

Do you know the way, my son?

Yes, Papa

East of the carob tree on the main road

There is a little path hemmed in by cactuses

At first, then it goes to the well

Getting wider and wider, then it leads

To the grapevines of Uncle Jamil

Who sells tobacco and sweets,

Then it loses itself on the threshing floor before

It picks itself up, comes in and sits down in our house

Like a parakeet.

— Do you know our home, my son?

I know it as well as I know the path

Jasmin grows around the iron gate

There are footprints of light on the stone steps

Behind the house a sunflower stares into the distance

And domestic bees prepare Grandfather’s breakfast

On a wicker platter.

In the courtyard, there is a well, a willow and a horse

And one of these tomorrows our pages will be leafed through behind the wall…

Papa, are you tired?

I see drops of sweat in your eyes.

— Yes, my son, I’m tired… Will you carry me?

— Just the way you carried me, Papa

And I’ll carry that tenderness

Until

My beginning and its beginning

And I’ll follow this road until

My end…. And until its end

Mahmoud Darwish was one of the great poets of the twentieth century.

Marilyn Hacker is the author of eighteen books of poems, most recently “Calligraphies” (Norton,2023) , two collaborative books, and twenty-two translations of French and francophone poets including Vénus Khoury-Ghata and Samira Negrouche . She has also translated work by Fadwa Suleiman, Golan Haji, and others from Arabic. “Water to Water,” a collaboration with Deema Shehabi, was published in December by Interlink Press.