Free A River Dies of Thirst by Mahmoud Darwish Catherine Cobham

valley, wrinkled, head bowed. Nothing frightens the deer and rabbits, and I wish for nothing as I follow the leaves descending gradually from a tree to the ground, like a woman slowly undressing in her lover’s imagination. Here I am a leaf, being carried by the breeze to a wintry sleep from which I will awake in blossom. Here, beside this genial eternity that is indifferent to the history of the mountain forts, a visitor like me can discover one of the meanings of clouds and say: ‘Thanks be to lightness!’
Two travellers to a river
    I see love five metres away, sitting in the departure lounge full of passengers travelling to permanent addresses. The airport is crowded. The French boy and the Japanese girl are detached from the crowd. Wrapped up, it appears to me, in a single blue cloud. They doze fitfully and pay no attention to their surroundings. He puts his head on her shoulder and she looks at him with a glance as soft as silk, which she is careful not to make too direct, as if she doesn’t want him to see her seeing him, as if they are at the beginning of love and she is shy of him knowing how much she is going to love him. Then the shyness switches from her to him. He looks at her when she puts her head on his shoulder with the look of someone who is afraid of breaking a fragile crystal ornament, and when their eyes meet, passionately and transparently, the girl gets up to buy a bottle of water. The girl feeds the water to the boy as if she were suckling him, and he feeds it to her as if he were kissing her. I close the novel I was reading on the journey to watch this image of love from a distance. I tremble, invigorated by an indefinable perfume drifting over me from a Japanese girl and a French boy as delicate together as male and female gazelles. He says nothing to her, and she says nothing to him. They are content with interludes of silence, like in Japanese music. Perhaps they are not old enough to talk about how they are no longer two separate beings. Had she said something to him, it would have been: ‘The river we are going to cross at the end of this journey passes close to our home.’ And had he said something to her, it would have been: ‘The river we are going to cross at the end of this journey is our home!’
A killer and innocent
    It is love, like a wave
    Recurrence of our bliss, old, new
    quick, slow
    innocent as a gazelle racing a bicycle
    and obscene, like a rooster
    Reckless like someone in need
    moody and vicious
    calm as imagination arranging its phrases
    Dark, gloomy, and bursting into light
    Empty and full of its contradictions
    It is animal/angel
    with the power of a thousand horses, and the lightness of a ghost
    equivocal, petulant, peaceable
    Whenever it flees, it returns
    It treats us well, and badly
    it takes us by surprise when we forget our emotions
    and arrives without warning
    It’s an anarchist/an egoist/
    master/one and only/multiple
    We believe sometimes, and sometimes have no faith
    but it is indifferent to us
    When it hunts us down one by one
    then slays us with a cool hand
    It is a killer, and innocent.
As if she is a song
    As if I had a dream: I saw you fair, dark
    golden brown, your own definition of colour
    You sit on my knee, as if you are you. As if I
    am I. And we have the night ahead of us
    to stroll in lilac-scented gardens. Everything there
    is here. It is all ours. You are mine, I am yours
    and the shadow, your shadow, laughs like an orange. The dream
    did its job and, like a postman, hurried on
    to someone else. So we have to be
    worthy, this evening, of ourselves, and of a river
    that runs along beside us, and that we flow into as it flows into us.
My poet/my other
    The poem is born at night from the water’s womb
    It weeps, crawls, walks, and runs in the dream
    blue white green. Then it grows up and makes its escape
    at dawn
    This happens while the poet is asleep, unaware of his poem
    and his surroundings. He does not see it taking its chance and flying