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by Najwan Darwish
Translated from Arabic by Kareem James Abu-Zeid

Nothing but the nightmare bus
passes by our home,
nothing but the whistle of a single train
sounds in our memory—
sometimes it takes our children,
sometimes it brings us colonizers.
Its whistle is the silence of victims,
its smoke is their history.
And in our sea, nothing
but a single ship casts anchor—
it brings colonizers
and escapes with victims.

What we feared came to pass.
What we hoped for never came.

Najwan Darwish is one of the foremost contemporary Arab poets. Since the publication of his first collection in 2000, his poetry has been hailed across the Arab world and beyond as a singular expression of the Palestinian struggle. He has published eight books in Arabic, and his work has been translated into more than twenty languages. NYRB Poets published Darwish’s collections Nothing More to Lose (2014) and Exhausted on the Cross (2021). Darwish lives between Haifa and his birthplace, Jerusalem.

Kareem James Abu-Zeid, PhD, is an award-winning translator of poets and novelists from across the Arab world and beyond, and has translated over a dozen full-length books from three different languages. His most recent translation is Najwan Darwish’s Exhausted on the Cross (NYRB Poets, 2021). He is also the author of the book The Poetics of Adonis and Yves Bonnefoy: Poetry as Spiritual Practice (Lockwood Press, 2021).

FROM Volume 70, Number 2

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