When the earth closes upon us... ~ Malinda Words

['The Morning Inspection' is the title of a column I wrote for the Daily News from 2009 to 2011, one article a day, Monday through Saturday. This is the 248th article in the new series that began in December 2022. Links to previous articles are given below]

What lies beyond the last frontier, one may ask. What flying space remains after the last sky, that’s another question. Then, how about the plant’s resting place after the last breath of air has been breathed?

These are questions asked by the poet Mahmoud Darwish. They are at-the-end-point questions. Unanswerable. A full stop has been placed. Conversation cannot proceed. Sorrows cannot be expressed. Hope has been buried. The earth has closed upon someone, a people, a land, an idea even. End of the line is not a happy place to arrive at.

Who on this planet has never ever felt that this terrible moment has arrived? It happens. There are down days that seem to have dragged us to the earth’s very core and all that is left is for the fact of closing in, the fact of burial to be completed. Then the full stop. Silence.

But then again, this world is also made of vicissitudes. Euphoria is interrupted. The tumultuous wave of sorrow breaks and sometimes the swirling waters take us ashore.

One might think that what holds for one would always hold for all, just as an individual’s fortunes ebb and flow so too with hope and hopelessness lift and batter respectively the collective. Maybe all we need to do is shift the goalpost or use a different unit of time. Moment, after all, in aggregate make minutes and minutes in aggregate produce hours and so we can think of day, week, month, year, decade, century or millennia.

‘This too shall pass’ is salve for the sole’s many blisters when one has walked and walked and walked only to arrive at cliff-edge, at the last frontier, full stop. But then there are moments when overarching histories are reduced to rubble and eventually dust that scatters far and wide, entombing moments, memories, heartaches and all the love poetry that one believes has ever been written.

And then we come to ‘what now?’

That moment has come for all people tormented one way or another, people who’ve felt the earth closing in and, as Darwish paints it, when the moving earth pushes us through the (narrow) last passage, they’ve had to tear off their limbs just to pass through. Darwish wishes the Earth were our mother, just so there would be kindness, but then when people ‘see the faces of those who will throw [their] children out of the window of this last space,’ what is left to do?

He answers:

We will write our names with scarlet steam. We will cut off the hand of the song to be finished by our flesh. We will die here, here in the last passage. Here and here our blood will plant its olive tree.

Good people, as I sit here, a few hours past midnight, thinking of the Palestine poet Mahmoud Darwish and the words he wrote so long ago as though he was writing for this day, which indeed tell us that there have been such days before, days of the earth closing in and people having to tear off limbs to pass through narrow passages, there are names being written with scarlet steam, the hands of songs to be finished by people’s flesh, they are dying, right there in the last passage and here and here, among ruins and repercussion, facts and fabrication, skies that dissolved by the acidic minds of a land-thief, there is blood, each drop planting an olive tree.

Yes, as the earth closes in upon all of us, literally and metaphorically, we obtain solace from the conviction that olive trees are being birthed by blood-drop in a land where passports need to be surrendered in order to hold tenaciously to identity. As the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish explains:

Passport

They did not recognize me in the shadows
That suck away my color in this Passport
And to them my wound was an exhibit
For a tourist Who loves to collect photographs
They did not recognize me,
Ah . . . Don’t leave
The palm of my hand without the sun
Because the trees recognize me
Don’t leave me pale like the moon!

All the birds that followed my palm
To the door of the distant airport
All the wheatfields
All the prisons
All the white tombstones
All the barbed Boundaries
All the waving handkerchiefs
All the eyes
were with me,
But they dropped them from my passport

Stripped of my name and identity?
On soil I nourished with my own hands?
Today Job cried out
Filling the sky:
Don’t make an example of me again!
Oh, gentlemen, Prophets,
Don’t ask the trees for their names
Don’t ask the valleys who their mother is
From my forehead bursts the sword of light
And from my hand springs the water of the river
All the hearts of the people are my identity
So take away my passport!

19 October 2023

When the earth closes upon us...

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