By The Mighty Darwish:

Shukran li-Tunis

Thanks to Tunis. She brought me back safely
from her love, so I cried amid her women in the public
auditorium when meaning slipped out of the words.
I was bidding the last summer farewell as a poet bids
a love eulogy farewell: What will I write
after her to another lover… if I love another?
In my language, ther is a seasickness. In my language there is
a mysterious departure from Tyre. Neither Carthage reins it in, nor
the wind of the southern barbarians. I came
in a seagull’s fashion, and pitched my new tent
on a heavenly slope. Right here I’ll write
a new chapter in the eulogies to the sea: mythic
is my language, and my heart a blue wave grazing
a rock: “Don’t give me, O sea, what I don’t deserve
of song. And don’t be, O sea, more or less than a song!”…
My language takes me in flight to our eternal unknown,
behind a present broken on two sides: If
you look behind you Sodom will awaken the place
to its sin… and if you look ahead you will awaken
history, so beware of the sting on either side… and follow me.
I tell it: My stay in Tunis is between
two ranks: my home here is not my home, nor
is my exile like exile. So here I am bidding her farewell,
and the sea air wounds me… the night’s musk wounds me,
and the jasmine necklace in the words people say wounds me,
and also the contemplation in the spiral path to the suburbs of the Andalus
wounds me…