A River Dies of Thirst

‘I know they’re strong and can invade and kill anyone. But they can’t break or occupy my words.’

‘If I write love poems, I resist the conditions that don’t allow me to write love poems.’

Poetry cannot afford ‘to lose its fundamentally self-delighting inventiveness, its joy in being a process of language as well as a representation of things in the world.’

‘In the midst of what is going on now, it is hard, when you sit down at a desk, to feel that morning after morning spent fiddling with words and rhythms is a justified activity.’

I didn’t see Jews as devils or angels, but as human beings. I always humanise the other. I will continue to humanise the enemy. Poems take the side of love not war.

‘If you go on writing such poetry,’ he said, ‘I’ll stop your father working in the quarry.’7

So of course he went on.

One thing that occupation does is threaten a sense of self:

‘I carry exile everywhere, as I carry my homeland,’ Darwish said once. ‘Exile is not a geographic state.’

Haifa says to me: ‘From now on, you are you!’

Did somebody once say that the master of words is the master of place? This is neither vanity nor a game. It is the poet’s way of defending the value of words, and the stability of place in a language which is vowelised and therefore mobile.