Travel Tickets
تذاكر سفر
A short poem addressed to the man who will kill him: search my pockets, you will find tickets — to peace, to the fields and the rain, to the conscience of humankind. Don't waste them.
On the day you kill me you’ll find in my pocket travel tickets…
(opening lines, translated by Abdullah al-Udhari)
About this poem
“Travel Tickets” is among the shortest and most reproduced of Samih al-Qasim’s poems, and its whole force comes from the address. The speaker is already dead; the person being spoken to is his killer, going through his pockets. What the killer finds is not a weapon or a document but tickets — one to peace, one to the fields and the rain, one to the conscience of humankind — and the poem’s only request is that he not waste them, but use them, and travel.
The move is characteristic of al-Qasim, who spent his life as a Palestinian citizen of Israel writing under and around military rule, and who was imprisoned and placed under house arrest more than once. It refuses both revenge and forgiveness, and hands the killer an obligation instead. The tickets are the poet’s estate, and the man who took his life is made his heir.
Several English versions circulate; the two best known are Abdullah al-Udhari’s, in his anthologies of modern Palestinian and Arabic poetry, and A. Z. Foreman’s. Al-Qasim died at al-Rama in the Galilee on 19 August 2014.
Sources
- Samih al-Qasim, “Travel Tickets,” trans. A. Z. Foreman — Poems Found in Translation (Arabic text and English translation)
- Beloved Palestinian Poet Samih al-Qasim Dies at 75 — ArabLit