In Jerusalem
في القدس
Darwish walks the Old City from one epoch into another without a memory to guide him — a poem in which prophets share a history and the walker is left asking who he is.
In Jerusalem, and I mean within the ancient walls, I walk from one epoch to another without a memory…
(opening lines, translated by Fady Joudah)
About this poem
“In Jerusalem” appears in The Butterfly’s Burden, the volume of three late Darwish books published in Fady Joudah’s English translation by Copper Canyon Press in 2007. The poem’s method is spatial: the speaker walks inside the walls of the Old City, and the walking carries him not across distance but across time, past prophets and epochs that share the same few hundred metres of stone.
What the poem refuses is ownership of that layering. Jerusalem in the propaganda of every party is a place where history proves a claim; Darwish’s walker moves through the same history without a memory to organise it, and the accumulation of sacred time produces disorientation rather than title. The poem ends not in possession but in a question about the identity of the one asking.
Read in Arabic and in translation, it has become one of the most quoted of Darwish’s late poems, and among the most frequently set and performed. Its restraint is the point: a poet who could have written the city as a slogan wrote it instead as a man losing track of himself between two gates.
Sources
- In Jerusalem — Poetry In Voice (full text, trans. Fady Joudah)
- The Butterfly’s Burden — Copper Canyon Press