(for Ellen and Abdullah,

after إميل حبيبي and  واصف جوهرية)



As it is written, they had become

bigger than the plane of Akka
for (in the sinking sun) they merged

with their own shadows.              Of whom
Habiby writes, perhaps it was a portrait

of the poet as a young Palestinian, holding
his mother’s hand. On one precise day,

anno domini and a late Autumn Monday 
the great diarist and oud player left the stone

walls of his temporary shelter, exchanging 
monastic sanctuary for a life of vagrancy.

But               unable to bear it               he afterwards left 
entirely while the shape of him remained, to range

between his Jerusalem home and Jericho
(first place of exile). To reason with it was

to know :              the inscription of gone things
need no reminders.                              Within the border

of a photograph, six by nine centimetres
(though likely conceived in inches) I finally see

two more dark lines beside my little father’s. In
Amman, coaxing their smallest one to face a light

they bent across their bodies in late sun, which
joined the poet of Al-Bira, and his mother, growing ever

vaster. Around this time our lives (Darwish, Sahhar 
and Jawhariyyeh) were indistinguishable. But

since the discovery was made only recently 
what the shadows told me was an answer

to the question Habiby poses on page sixteen
(of several editions) that to the contrary               we

will never disappear.