"The Dice Player" by Mahmoud Darwish

One of the first Animated Poetry Films done with an arabic poem "The Dice Player" by Mahmoud Darwish

An animated Poem by Nissmah Roshdy

The Dice Player

Mahmoud Darwish

Who am I to say to you

what I’m saying?

I wasn’t a stone washed by water

so I became a face

I wasn’t a reed pierced by the wind

so I became a flute

I’m the way the dice fall

sometimes winning sometimes losing

I’m like you

or maybe slightly less …

I was born beside the well

where three single trees stood like nuns

I was born without ceremony or a midwife

and belonged to a family

by chance

inheriting its features, idiosyncrasies

and illnesses:

First: feeble arteries and high blood pressure

Second: shyness in talking with mother, father,

grandmother – or a tree

Third: the belief that flu can be cured with a hot cup of

chamomile

Fourth: a disinclination to talk about gazelles or skylarks

Fifth: a tendency to boredom on winter nights

Sixth: a farcical inability to sing

I had no say in who I was

It was by chance I turned out

male

by chance that I found the upturned moon

pale as a lemon

urging on the night

and just as easily

could find a mole hidden in the deepest recess of my

groin

It’s possible

I might not have been

and my father might not have been

then he wouldn’t have married my mother

by chance

I might have been like my sister

who screamed then died and never knew it

because she lived for an hour and didn’t know her

mother …

Or one could say: like a pigeon’s egg which breaks before

the chick can hatch from its shell

I happened by chance

me the survivor of the bus accident

because I was late going to school

forgetting the here and now

while reading a love story at night

losing myself in story-teller and victim of love

til I became a martyr of passion in the story

and the survivor of the bus accident!

I can’t see myself joking with the sea

but I am a reckless kid

one of my hobbies is to dawdle in the waves

when they’re singing: Come to me!

And I can’t see myself being rescued from the sea

I was saved by a sort of seagull

who saw the playful waves paralyzing my hand

It’s possible

I wouldn’t have been struck with the madness of the Jahili

Mu’alaqaat1

if the door of the house had faced North

and not overlooked the sea

if the army patrol hadn’t seen the fire of the villagers

making bread that night

if 15 martyrs had been able to rebuild the barricades

if that rural place hadn’t been obliterated

perhaps I’d have become an olive tree

or a geography teacher

or an expert in the realm of ants

or guardian of an echo!

who am I to say to you

what I’m saying

at the door of the church

I’m nothing but the fall of the dice

landing between predator and prey

winning a clarity that obscures my happiness on moonlit

nights

and obliges me to witness the carnage

It was by chance

I escaped

I was smaller than a military target

and larger than a bee hovering between the flowers on the

fence

I feared a lot for my brothers and father

feared for time made of glass

feared for my cat and my rabbit

feared for the magical moon above the high minaret of the

mosque

feared for the grapes on the vine dangling like the teats of

our dog

Fear walked in me and I walked in it

barefoot

forgetting my little memories or what I want from

tomorrow

– there’s no time for tomorrow –

I walk, scramble, run, climb, get down, scream, bark,

howl, call out, wail, speed up, slow down, love, become

lighter, drier, march on, fly, see, don’t see, stumble,

become yellow, green, blue, gasp, sob, thirst, get

tired, struggle, fall, get up, run, forget, see,

don’t see, remember, hear, look, wonder, hallucinate, mumble,

yell I can’t, moan, go mad, stay, become less and more,

fall, rise, collapse, bleed and faint

And by chance

with my lack of luck

the wolves disappeared from there

or we escaped the soldiers

I have no say in my life

except that I am

when life taught me its hymns

I said: do you have more?

so I lit its lantern

and it tried to oblige

I might not have been a swallow

if the wind had wanted it that way

the wind is the luck of the traveller

I went north, east and west

but the south was far and impenetrable to me

because the south is my home

So I became a metaphor of a swallow soaring above my

debris

in Spring and Autumn

trying out my feathers in the clouds above the lake

scattering my greetings on my protector

who does not die

because he has God’s soul

and God is the luck of the prophet

Luckily I live next to the divinities

Unluckily

the cross is the only ladder to our tomorrow

Who am I to say to you

what I’m saying

Who am I?

It’s possible

inspiration might not have come

inspiration is the luck of the loner

this poem is a dice throw

onto a board of darkness

that glows and doesn’t glow

words fall

like feathers on sand

I don’t think it was me who wrote the poem

I just obeyed its rhythm:

the flow of feelings each affecting the next

meaning given by intuition

a trance in the echoing words

the image of myself taken from me and given to another

with no one to help me

and my longing for the source

I don’t think it was me who wrote the poem

except when inspiration stopped

and inspiration is the luck of the skillful

when they apply themselves

The only possibility was

to love the girl who asked me:

What time is it?

on my way to the cinema.

And it was only possible for her to be a mulatta

which she was

or a passing mystery and a darkness

It’s like this the words multiply

I induce my heart to love so it has room for flowers and

thorns …

My vocabulary is mystic and my desires corporeal

And I’m not who I am now unless there’s a meeting of

two:

me and my feminine self

Love! What are you?

How much are you? You

and not you?

Love! Rage like a tempest over us

so we can find only what the divinities want of my body

and pour away the rest in a funnel

You – whether displayed or hidden –

have no shape

and we love you when we love

by chance

You’re the luck of the poor

Unfortunately

I often escaped love’s closure

but fortunately stayed fit enough to re-open its door!

Secretly, the canny lover says to himself:

Love is our truthful lie

Overhearing him, his beloved replies:

love comes and goes

like lightening and thunder

To life I say: slow down wait for me until intoxication has

dried out in my glass

In the garden all the flowers are ours

and the wind can’t unwind itself from the rose

Wait for me so the nightingales don’t flee the town square

and make me break the rhythm

while the minstrels tighten their strings for the goodbye

song

Go slow for me and be brief so the song won’t take long

lest my delivery interrupt the prelude and split it in two

let two and two make one

Long Live Life!

Take your time and take me in your arms

so the wind doesn’t scatter me

Even when I’m carried by the wind

I can’t unwind myself from the alphabet

If I hadn’t scaled the mountain

I might have been happy with an eagle’s eyrie: nothing

loftier

but such glory crowned with infinite blue gold

is difficult to visit:

Up there the loner stays lonely

and can’t come down on his feet

So no eagle walks

no human flies

How much a peak resembles an abyss

You – o solitude of the summit know it!

I have no say in what I was

or will be …

It’s luck.

And luck has no name

We might name it:

the blacksmith of our fate or

the postman of the heavens or

the carpenter of the newborn’s cradle and the dead man’s

coffin or

Let’s call it the legendary gods’ servant

whose lines we wrote while hiding behind Olympus …

which the hungry potters believed

but the bloated lords of gold didn’t

unluckily for their author

this ghost standing on the stage is real

Behind the scenes it’s something else

the question is no longer: When?

but: Why? How? And Who?

Who am I to say to you

what I’m saying?

It’s possible not to have been

suppose the convoy fell into an ambush

and suppose the family lost a son

like the one now writing this poem

letter by letter

bleeding and bleeding

on this sofa

blood black as black

not a crow’s ink

nor its caw

it’s the whole night squeezed out by hand

drop by drop

by the hand of luck and talent

It’s possible that poetry might have gained more

if precisely this poet hadn’t existed

a hoopoe at the edge of the abyss

Though the poet might say: If I’d been another

I would become only me again

This is how I bluff:

Narcissus wasn’t as beautiful as he thought.

His creators trapped him in his reflection

so I ripple the smooth image with droplets of water …

Suppose he’d been able to see someone other than himself and could

have seen the love of a girl gazing at him

forget the stags running between the lilies and daisies …

if he’d been just a fraction cleverer

he’d have smashed the mirror

and seen how much he was like to others

Yet if he’d been free

he wouldn’t have become a myth …

In the desert the mirage is the traveller’s book

and without it

without the mirage

he won’t continue searching for water

There’s a cloud, he tells himself carrying his jug of hope

in one hand and clutching his belly with the other

and he thumbs his errors into the sand

to corral the clouds into a pit

And the mirage calls him, lures, misleads him

then lifts him up:

read if you can’t read

write if you can’t write

So he reads: water water water

and writes a sentence in the sand:

without the mirage I wouldn’t be alive til now

And it’s the luck of the traveller that

hope is the twin of despair

or else his improvised poetry

When the sky is grey

And I see a rose sprouting through the cracks in a wall

I don’t say: the sky is grey

but keep my eye on the rose and tell it:

it’s quite a day!

Just as at nightfall

I say to my two friends:

If there has to be a dream

let it be like us and simple

For example: after two days

the three of us will dine

to fete our dream’s premonition

that after two days

not one of us will have been lost

So let’s celebrate in the moon’s sonata

and make a toast to the lenience of death

who saw the three of us happy together

and decided to look the other way!

I don’t say: far away life is real with its imaginary places

I say: life here is possible

By chance this land became holy

its lakes hills and trees aren’t replicas of those in paradise

It became holy because a prophet walked here

prayed on a rock that began to weep

and the mount fell down from fear of God

then passed out

And by chance the slope of a field in this country

becomes a museum of dust

because too many soldiers from both sides die there

defending two leaders

who waiting in two silken tents for their spoils

give the order to Charge!

Soldiers die time and again without ever knowing who won

Meanwhile the surviving storytellers say:

if by chance the others had 

won!

History’s headlines could have been different

O land I love you green

Green

an apple dancing in water and light

Green

your night green, your dawn green

so plant me with the tenderness of a mother’s hand

in a handful of air

I am one of your seeds

Green …

That stanza has more than one poet

and it’s possible it didn’t have to be lyrical

Who am I to say to you

what I’m saying?

It would have been possible not to be who I am

It would have been possible not to be here …

it would have been possible

if the plane had crashed that morning with me on board

Luckily I’m a late riser

and missed the flight

It would have been possible never to have visited Cairo

Damascus the Louvre and other magical cities

If I’d been walking slower

the rifle shot might have cut my shadow off from

the watchful cypress

If I’d been walking faster

I might have been shattered to pieces by shrapnel

and become a passing thought

It’s possible if I’d dreamed more excessively

I might have lost my memory

Luckily I sleep alone