Unfortunately It Was Paradise Selected Poems Quotes

We are captives, even if our wheat grows over the fences/ and swallows rise from our broken chains./ We are captives of what we love, what we desire, and what we are.

The stars had only one task: they taught me how to read. They taught me I had a language in heaven and another language on earth.

Where can I free myself of the homeland in my body?

No night is long enough for us to dream twice.

I have learned and dismantled all the words in order to draw from them a single word: Home.

Be my lover between two wars waged in the mirror, she said. I don't want to return now to the fortress of my father's house. Take me to your vineyard. Let me meet your mother. Perfume me with basil water. Arrange me on silver dishes, comb me, imprison me in your name, let love kill me.

The poem is in my hands, and can run stories through her hands.

We have on this earth what makes life worth living: April’s hesitation, the aroma of bread at dawn, a woman’s point of view about men, the works of Aeschylus, the beginning of love, grass on a stone, mothers living on a flute’s sigh and the invaders’ fear of memories.

I love women whose hidden desires make horses put an end to their lives at the threshold

Please take your time. I want you to kill me slowly so I can write my last poem to my wife's heart. They laughed, and took from me only the words dedicated to my wife's heart.

One day, I will be a poet. Water will depend on my visions.

There is no name for what life should be, except what you did and what you do to my soul.

If there must be a moon, let it be high, a high moon made in Baghdad, neither Arab, nor Persian, nor claimed by the goddesses all around us.

We journey towards a home that does not halo our head with a special sun. Mythical women applaud us. A sea for us, a sea against us.

I love you so, you are so much yourself! He is so afraid of his soul: no "I" now but she. She is now within me. And no "she" now but only my fragile "I" At the end of this song, how much I fear that my dream may not see its dream in her.

May poetry and God's name have mercy on us!

I prepare my portrait for my woman to hang on a wall when I die. she says: Is there a wall to hang it on? I say: We'll build a room for it. Where? In any house.

I know who opens the door to the jasmine tree as it makes our dreams blossom for the evening's guests.

After you nothing goes and nothing returns.

Where can I write my latest account of the body's incarnation? It's the end of what was bound to end! Where is that which ends? Where can I free myself of the homeland in my body?

So let there be prose. There must be a divine prose for the Prophet to triumph

The poem is neither here nor there, and with a girl's breast it can illuminate the nights. With the glow of an apple it fills two bodies with light and with a gardenia's breath it can revive a homeland!

May life suddenly open on the wing of a butterfly fluttering over a rhyme for those who do not care about meaning.

I love women whose hidden desires make horses put an end to their lives at the threshold — Mahmoud Darwish, Unfortunately, It Was Paradise: Selected Poems (University of California Press; 0 edition, January 6, 2003)

Like a balcony, I gaze upon whatever I desire. I gaze upon my ghost approaching from afar.

Memory has the fragrance of a weeping night flower arousing in the exile's blood a need for singing: Lift up my grief, so I can retrieve my time.

We still live as if death mistakes us. We—who are capable of remembrance—are capable of liberation.

Wouldn't it be better if we defied our ages and gazed much longer at the last sky before moonset? Addresses for the soul, outside this place. I love to travel to any wind ... But I don't love to arrive.

Sublime Books The Known World, by Edward P. Jones The Buried Giant, by Kazuo Ishiguro A Thousand Trails Home, by Seth Kantner House Made of Dawn, by N. Scott Momaday Faithful and Virtuous Night, by Louise Glück The Left Hand of Darkness, by Ursula K. Le Guin My Sentence Was a Thousand Years of Joy, by Robert Bly The World Without Us, by Alan Weisman Unfortunately, It Was Paradise, by Mahmoud Darwish Collected Fictions, by Jorge Luis Borges, trans. Andrew Hurley The Xenogenesis Trilogy, by Octavia E. Butler Map: Collected and Last Poems, by Wisława Szymborska In the Lateness of the World, by Carolyn Forché Angels, by Denis Johnson Postcolonial Love Poem, by Natalie Diaz Hope Against Hope, by Nadezhda Mandelstam Exhalation, by Ted Chaing Strange Empire, by Joseph Kinsey Howard Tookie’s Pandemic Reading Deep Survival, by Laurence Gonzales The Lost City of the Monkey God, by Douglas Preston The House of Broken Angels, by Luis Alberto Urrea The Heartsong of Charging Elk, by James Welch Selected Stories of Anton Chekhov, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating, by Elisabeth Tova Bailey Let’s Take the Long Way Home, by Gail Caldwell The Aubrey/Maturin Novels, by Patrick O’Brian The Ibis Trilogy, by Amitav Ghosh The Golden Wolf Saga, by Linnea Hartsuyker Children of Time, by Adrian Tchaikovsky Coyote Warrior, by Paul VanDevelder Incarceration Felon, by Reginald Dwayne Betts Against the Loveless World, by Susan Abulhawa Waiting for an Echo, by Christine Montross, M.D. The Mars Room, by Rachel Kushner The New Jim Crow, by Michelle Alexander This Is Where, by Louise K. Waakaa’igan I Will Never See the World Again, by Ahmet Altan Sorrow Mountain, by Ani Pachen and Adelaide Donnelley American Prison, by Shane Bauer Solitary, by Albert Woodfox Are Prisons Obsolete?, by Angela Y. Davis 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows, by Ai Weiwei Books contain everything worth knowing except what ultimately matters. —Tookie * * * If you are interested in the books on these lists, please seek them out at your local independent bookstore. Miigwech! Acknowledgments