Your Night Is Of Lilac

by Mahmoud Darwish

The night sits wherever you are. Your night

is of lilac. Every now and then a gesture escapes

from the beam of your dimples, breaks the wineglass

and lights up the starlight. And your night is your shadow—

a fairy-tale piece of land to make our dreams

equal. I am not a traveler or a dweller

in your lilac night, I am he who was one day

me. Whenever night grew in you I guessed

the heart's rank between two grades: neither

the self accepts, nor the soul accepts. But in our bodies

a heaven and an earth embrace. And all of you

is your night ... radiant night like planet ink. Night

is the covenant of night, crawling in my body

anesthetized like a fox's sleepiness. Night diffusing a mystery

that illuminates my language, whenever it is clearer

I become more fearful of a tomorrow in the fist. Night

staring at itself safe and assured in its

endlessness, nothing celebrates it except its mirror

and the ancient shepherd songs in a summer of emperors

who get sick on love. Night that flourished in its Jahili poetry

on the whims of Imru' el-Qyss and others,

and widened for the dreamers the milk path to a hungry

moon in the remoteness of speech ...