For Fadwa Tuqan ... 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.