Arabic Poem "Psalm 9" By Mahmoud Darwish

O rose beyond the reach of time and of the senses
O kiss enveloped in the scarves of all the winds
surprise me with one dream
that my madness will recoil from you.



Recoiling from you
In order to approach you
I discovered time.

Approaching you
in order to recoil from you
I discovered my senses.

Between approach and recoil
there is a stone the size of a dream
It does not approach
It does not recoil.

You are my country
A stone is not what I am
therefore I do not like to face the sky
nor do I die level with the ground
but I am a stranger, always a stranger.

Arabic Poem "Diary of a Palestinian Wound" By Mahmoud Darwish

We do not need to be reminded:
Mount Carmel is in us
and on our eyelashes the grass of Galilee.
Do not say: If we could run to her like a river.
Do not say it:
We and our country are one flesh and bone.



Before June we were not fledgeling doves
so our love did not wither in bondage.
Sister, these twenty years
our work was not to write poems
but to be fighting.

The shadow that descends over your eyes
-demon of a God
who came out of the month of June
to wrap around our heads the sun-
his color is martyrdom
the taste of prayer.
How well he kills, how well he resurrects!

The night that began in your eyes-
in my soul it was a long night's end:
Here and now we keep company
on the road of our return
from the age of drought.

And we came to know what makes the voice of the nightingale
a dagger shining in the face of the invaders.
We came to know what makes the silence of the graveyard
a festival...orchards of life.

You sang your poems, I saw the balconies
desert their walls
the city square extending to the midriff of the mountain:
It was not music we heard.
It was not the color of words we saw:
A million heroes were in the room.

This land absorbs the skins of martyrs.
This land promises wheat and stars.
Worship it!
We are its salt and its water.
We are its wound, but a wound that fights.

Sister, there are tears in my throat
and there is fire in my eyes:
I am free.
No more shall I protest at the Sultan's Gate.
All who have died, all who shall die at the Gate of Day
have embraced me, have made of me a weapon.

Ah my intractable wound!
My country is not a suitcase
I am not a traveler
I am the lover and the land is the beloved.

The archaeologist is busy analyzing stones.
In the rubble of legends he searches for his own eyes
to show
that I am a sightless vagrant on the road
with not one letter in civilization's alphabet.
Meanwhile in my own time I plant my trees.
I sing of my love.

It is time for me to exchange the word for the deed
Time to prove my love for the land and for the nightingale:
For in this age the weapon devours the guitar
And in the mirror I have been fading more and more
Since at my back a tree began to grow.

Arabic Poem "Identity Card" By Mahmoud Darwish

Record !
I am an Arab
And my identity card is number fifty thousand
I have eight children
And the nineth is coming after a summer
Will you be angry?



Record !
I am an Arab
Employed with fellow workers at a quarry
I have eight children
I get them bread
Garments and books
from the rocks...
I do not supplicate charity at your doors
Nor do I belittle myself
at the footsteps of your chamber
So will you be angry?

Record !
I am an Arab
I have a name without a title
Patient in a country
Where people are enraged
My roots
Were entrenched before the birth of time
And before the opening of the eras
Before the pines, and the olive trees
And before the grass grew.

My father..
descends from the family of the plow
Not from a privileged class
And my grandfather..was a farmer
Neither well-bred, nor well-born!
Teaches me the pride of the sun
Before teaching me how to read
And my house
is like a watchman's hut
Made of branches and cane
Are you satisfied with my status?
I have a name without a title !

Record !
I am an Arab
You have stolen the orchards
of my ancestors
And the land
which I cultivated
Along with my children
And you left nothing for us
Except for these rocks..
So will the State take them
As it has been said?!

Therefore !
Record on the top of the first page:
I do not hate people
Nor do I encroach
But if I become hungry
The usurper's flesh will be my food
Beware..
Beware..
Of my hunger
And my anger !

Arabic Poem "My Mother" By Mahmoud Darwish

I long for my mother's bread
My mother's coffee
Her touch
Childhood memories grow up in me
Day after day
I must be worth my life
At the hour of my death
Worth the tears of my mother



And if I come back one day
Take me as a veil to your eyelashes
Cover my bones with the grass
Blessed by your footsteps
Bind us together
With a lock of your hair
With a thread that trails from the back of your dress
I might become immortal
Become a God
If I touch the depths of your heart.

If I come back
Use me as wood to feed your fire
As the clothesline on the roof of your house
Without your blessing
I am too weak to stand.

I am old
Give me back the star maps of childhood
So that I
Along with the swallows
Can chart the path
Back to your waiting nest.

Poem "Becoming A Woman" By Hilary Tham (Personal Reviews)

Hilary Tham Goldberg, 58, a poet, painter and teacher who viewed the world from the perspective of a Chinese-Malaysian converted Jewish wife and mother in suburban America. She died in June 24 of metastatic lung cancer at her home in Arlington. Mrs. Goldberg was born in Klang, Malaysia, the daughter of Chinese immigrants, and was educated at a convent school taught by Irish nuns. Her grandmother grumbled that she wasted too much time with her nose in a book, but a high school English teacher urged her to continue reading and to write poetry. She received a master's degree in English literature in 1969 from the University of Malaya and immigrated to the United States in 1971 after her marriage to a Peace Corps volunteer in Malaysia. She lived in New Jersey before moving to Arlington in 1973.



In addition to writing poetry, she did Chinese brush painting. For Mrs. Goldberg, who wrote under the name Hilary Tham, poetry -- and painting, for that matter -- grew out of the closely observed world around her, her daily life and deep relationships and her rich multiethnic heritage. In a 2001 Potomac Review essay, she wrote: "I am a writer, a woman, a blend of many cultures: Chinese-Malaysian by birth, American by love of my husband and Jewish by choice. My identity is trellised on Judeo-western principles and ideals, but my roots delve deep in Chinese lore."
Hilary Tham's "Becoming A Woman" highlight the receiving of maternal wisdom that only women who are going through it. This poem presents various portraits of the transition from childhood to adulthood. This clearly stated in stanza 3 :

“You will bleed
at a special time of the moon.”
she told me. “Use these
to preserve modesty and the secret
of your femalesness.”

Becoming a woman is a rite of passage that starts with the changes of early puberty and ends with a woman's first periods. A girl grows and changes in ways that prepare her to be able to have a baby. These changes occur in certain stages. Gender representation on female clearly take places in this poem. The poet perhaps tell the story within her own experiences on becoming a woman. In stanza 4, the poet told :

Her mother’s way she passed to me
with the few words she had received
at her initiation.

Afterall, it become necessary for a little girl going through this phase; becoming a woman, and it is someone called mother to teached her little child about becoming a woman through her own experienced and from what her late mother’s told her. Then, it becomes a woman responsible, the great responsibilities carry out from generation that men can’t do; give birth. It’s an honour for a woman to give birth and it becomes mother’s responsibilities to carry out their jobs to tell their child especially girl on becoming a woman.

Poem “A Figure Forgotten in Hours Not-of-Need” By Kee Thuan Chye (Personal Reviews)

Another powerful and meaningful poem is by Kee Thuan Chye, “A Figure Forgotten in Hours Not-of-Need”. A little brief about Kee Thuan Chye, he was born on May 25, 1954 in Penang, Malaysia. He was a noted Malaysian dramatist, poet and journalist. Kee graduated from Universiti Sains Malaysia in 1976 and received his masters in drama from England’s Essex University in 1988. Kee served as literary editor and occasional film reviewer for the New Straits Times, arts columnist for Business Times, theater columnist for New Sunday Times, and is now associate editor in charge of the English column, “Mind Our English” for The Star (Malaysia). Other publications featuring his articles and reviews include Asiaweek, Far Eastern Economic Review, and Asia Magazine.



Kee Thuan Chye, “A Figure Forgotten in Hours Not-of-Need” shows that people only totally understand, love and miss their mother when they need her help”. For the speaker in this poem, his mother, up until the point that the poem is written, was no more than a figure. However, the poem itself is an expression of the speaker’s desperation “in helpless moments” when he most understands the figure who had sacrificed so much for him, but whom he had remonstrated in the good times. Spurred on by a poignant sense of helplessness, the speaker ponders his relationship with his mother. He now understands her actions that he once condemned. He says:

You are not the purest of women
but you toiled for your children,
throwing morals coyly to the wind.
How else could we have grown up
with cushioned settees to sit on
and hot cuisine to nourish our hungry souls?

These lines strongly suggest that the speaker’s mother had compromised her morals – engaging in prostitution, perhaps? – to fund her children’s upbringing, the standards of which seemed to be quite high as the words “settees” and “cuisine” insinuate. It is now clear to the speaker that his mother did what she had to do to protect her children from the harsh realities of life. The speaker says:

Now, in helpless moments,
I think of you,
a figure forgotten
in hours not-of-need,
but a comforter of the past
who caught cockroaches with bare hands.

The speaker’s mother caught cockroaches with bare hands, a brave action which the speaker, even as an adult, is still afraid of doing. From a symbolic angle, one can argue that, in the poem, cockroaches represent the filthy realities of life – such as the compromising of one’s morals in order to protect others – which the speaker, unlike his mother, is still unwilling to face as an adult. He says:

And though it’s a sin to grow old
And to lost your dearest treasures,
You stoutly go your humdrum ways
While I curse the drudgery of life.
I am still afraid of cockroaches.

So, it would seem, from this poem, that one’s mother is especially loved, missed and finally understood only when the child is faced by life’s dilemma’s and challenges that the parent had so willingly faced up to all in the name of love for her children. In the last three lines of the poem the speaker laments:

But when I think
how little live I’ve shown you in return,
I sometimes cry.

This poem shows that woman’s sacrifice is more than anything and nothing can be compared with it.