Leena Younis

“Longing is the call of ney to ney to restore the direction broken by the horses’ hooves in a military campaign. It is an intermittent ailment, neither contagious nor lethal, even when it takes the form of an epidemic. It is an invitation to stay up late with the lonesome and an excuse not to be on equal footing with train passengers who know their own addresses well. It is the transparent fabric of that beautiful nothingness, gathered to roast the coffee of wakefulness for the dreams of strangers.”
― Mahmoud Darwish, In the Presence of Absence

“O my language,
help me to adapt and embrace the universe. Inside me
there’s a balcony no one passes under for a greeting.
And outside me a world that doesn’t return the greeting.
My language, will I become what you’ll become, or are you
what becomes of me?
[…] For who, if I utter what isn’t poetry,
will understand me? Who will speak to me of a hidden
longing for a lost time if I utter what isn’t poetry?
And who will know the stranger’s land? …”
― Mahmoud Darwish, If I Were Another: Poems

“Had I known you, I would have possessed you, and had you known me, you would have possessed me. But then you and I would not be.”
― Mahmoud Darwish, In the Presence of Absence

“The mercy bullet

I envy horses: if they break a leg and feel humiliated because they can no longer charge back and forth in the wind, they are cured by a mercy bullet. So if something in me gets broken, physically or spiritually, I would do well to look for a proficient killer, even if he is one of my enemies. I will pay him a fee and the price of the bullet, kiss his hand and his revolver, and if I am able to write, extol him in a poem of rare beauty, for which he can choose the metre and rhyme.”
― Mahmoud Darwish, A River Dies of Thirst: Journals