Recently, while traveling, circumstances beyond my control caused me to become uncommonly hungry. Hunger is something I cannot endure well, because of a tendency to hypoglycemia. I have on occasions become dysfunctional, unable to think, and afterwards could not remember what I had done. But on the day I am speaking of, I just felt an acute need for food. Still able to think, I remembered that it was the middle of Ramadan and Muslims all over the world were fasting. I sincerely hoped that when they got up in the dark, they had eaten a bigger breakfast than I had.
Today I found this poem of Mahmoud Darwish, a Palestinian poet whom I have loved since my first glimpse of his work. I think it was not meant to be for Ramadan, but for every day.
I suggest you read it slowly, two lines at a time. Maybe over and over, as I have.
As you prepare your breakfast, think of others
(do not forget the pigeon’s food)
As you pay your water bill, think of others
(those who are nursed by the clouds)
As you return home, to your home, think of others
(do not forget the people in the camps)
As you sleep and count the stars, think of others
(those who have nowhere to sleep)
As you express yourself in metaphor, think of others
(those who have lost the right to speak)
As you think of others far away, think of yourself
(say: If only I were a candle in the dark.)
In the first five two-line stanzas of this poem, penned by a Palestinian Muslim, I find the spirit of all the great religions, a mindful gratitude and the prayerful and practical working out of the Golden Rule, the “Do Unto Others” found in the Hebrew scriptures, quoted by Jesus, absorbed into the ethics of the humane and decent people of the earth. Yet the poem never says, “Do…” I have merely assumed what the poet must be assuming. Out of our thoughts we act.
Think of others—the hungry and thirsty, the homeless, the oppressed— and go where this leads you. Darwish must have been thinking of his displaced countrymen. So do I. And the Syrians, the Yazidis, the Iraqis. Forget anger, the poem seems to say. Forget differences. Don’t be afraid. Feel with your brother/sister human.
And then that surprising final stanza, turns me around. “Think of yourself.”
Me. Grateful me. Think of myself and wish.
“If only…”
I want to say it. “If only I were…”
Instead I wonder. ”What if…?”
If I were a candle glowing in the night, what would that flame mean? Where would it lead?
I shall not muddy the atmosphere around Darwish’s simple words by saying more, though the end has led me to this question I ask myself.
It is still Ramadan. I am not fasting, but there are things for which I hunger, wishes that make me dizzy with need. In some hours I seek and wait, and in other hours I am fed.
I accept the poem as a gift to my day and offer it as a gift to yours.
Mahmoud Darwish (pronounced Darweesh) did not normally write on religious themes, and I cannot assume he meant to be doing so in this poem. His work, which has been published in 20 languages, is considered to be the voice of the Palestinian Resistance because many of them deal with the Nakba (the catastrophe of losing Palestine) and the longing for a homeland.
Darwish was born in the village of al-Birwa in the Western Galilee. His family were landowners. When Israeli forces assaulted his village in June 1948, the family fled to Lebanon. The Israeli army then destroyed al-Birwa to prevent its inhabitants from returning, but a year later the Darwish family was permitted to return to the Acre area. He eventually moved to Haifa. His first published poem was in Al Jadid, a literary periodical of the Israeli Communist Party, when Darwish was 19. He left Israel in 1970 to study at the University of Moscow for one year. After that he lived in Egypt and Lebanon. In 1973 he joined the PLO and was not permitted to live in Israel again. He always insisted that he did not hate the Jews and several of his poems are about a Jewish woman with whom he was once in love.
Ten per cent of all purchases of Frances Fuller’s book In Borrowed Houses made from this website are donated to refugee relief.