Epic of the Thyme of Palestine
By Taher Bekri
In memory of Mahmoud Darwish
Translated by Marilyn Hacker
I perfumed the hills and plains
Nourished by brilliant light
Accompanied wanderers’ steps
Through the earth’s ancestral rites
All those domes, bell-towers, temples
Offered up for a thousand prayers
That sudden rain which mingled
My scent with the steadfast stones
Alert for gaping rifts
The rocks grasp leaves that I dropped
In the dusk of centuries stretching
Themselves out in history’s pit
Neighbor sea, I loved your murmur
That consoled my trembling, joined
By flutes, rocked by solar olive trees
They came by night with reptilian tanks
Razored treads sheared my sprigs
That held a dream built like a stream
I still see you, children scorched by phosphorus
Ashes blackened by clouds bleached
Of blood and cowardly dust
Beneath skies gashed by cast lead
Hospitals bled from a hundred shells
Schools that are like graveyards
And I don’t forget the path the wind took
To extinguish your genie-less lamps
Who could claim that a rifle was hidden
In flour, or rockets in kitchens
When beds were ripped open on sleeping
Bodies, thresholds smirched with shame
How not to see you, batsIn the blindness of the night
Master boots that march on my summers
Scoured of secular lemon-trees
How not to know you, crows
In the brainless drones overhead
Winter covered by wailing sirens
Houses like graves without stones
Among the dark cries, among ruins
I consoled the stars brusquely awakened
Terrified by your gunpowder trails
My new leaves your arsonists’ martyr
I tell you this, thyme is to flavor
Olive-oil bread kneaded and baked
On my flames, not to light your fires
Neither rosemary, friend of my cypresses
Nor waters wrenched from their source
Will pardon your memory’s gaps
I tell you this, thyme is for proud
Old roads, it is not for vultures
Thyme is for birds at rest
Freed from their need and their fear
Not to starve out trees and nests
Not to punish mothers and cradles
I defy you, hyenas in helmets
Thyme, even hemmed in by the Wall
Will burst through sea, sky and earth
So many armies for one herb
Still cannot prevent my bestowing
My fragrance on open-armed people
January 27 2009
[Translated from the French by Marilyn Hacker. Taher Bekri was born in Tunisia in 1951. He writes poetry in Arabic and French. He has lived in Paris since 1976 and has published over twnty books.]