Mahmoud Darwish is the foremost contemporary Palestinian poet.
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The trouble is that man

with all his teeth intact

can bite like a lion

while his noisy heart

beats like a lion’s too.
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Yet for more than a thousand years

he has lived at peace with himself

admiring the wheat that was his own.

Then stones seemed as soft as pillows

he could rest his head upon
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while counting the stars.

Now, however, like Kronos,

he could eat his own children.

“Where is justice,” he asks,

“when roots sprout nothing but weeds

and a whole genealogy is disinterred

into a pile of smithereens?”

Still, there will come a time

when sticks and stones

shall be mightier than atoms.

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