No one guided me to myself. I am the guide.

Between desert and sea, I am my own guide to myself.

Born of language on the road to India between two small tribes,

adorned by the moonlight of ancient faiths and an impossible peace,

compelled to guard the periphery of a Persian neighbourhood

and the great obsession of the Byzantines,

so that the heaviness of time lightens over the Arab’s tent.

Who am I? This is a question that others ask, but has no answer.

I am my language, I am an ode, two odes, ten. This is my language.

I am my language. I am words’ writ: Be! Be my body!

And I become an embodiment of their timbre.

I am what I have spoken to the words: Be the place where

my body joins the eternity of the desert.

Be, so that I may become my words.

No land on earth bears me. Only my words bear me,

a bird born from me who builds a nest in my ruins

before me, and in the rubble of the enchanting world around me.

I stood on the wind, and my long night was without end.

This is my language, a necklace of stars around the necks

of my loved ones.

– extract from ‘A Rhyme for the Odes’

by Mahmoud Darwish, from the collection ‘Unfortunately, It Was Paradise’

(13 March 1941 – 9 August 2008)