Praise the High Shadow
Written on the deck of a ship leaving Beirut in August 1982, after seventy-seven days of siege and a negotiated evacuation of the Palestinian leadership. The speaker argues with the sea, with the Arab governments and with his own rhetoric, and keeps asking what a poem is worth to a man being shipped out of the last city that would have him. Darwish's most direct war writing, and the point at which he begins to distrust the voice that made him famous.
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