The question culminates at the threshold of the ruined campsite:
At Jaffa’s gates, O beloved ones,
Among the chaotic wreckage of houses,
Among the debris and the thorns
I stood, addressing my eyes: You eyes
“stop and we will weep,”
At the ruins of the departed...In this first part, there is a comparison between what was before and what the
situation is at the present time. Looking upon the whole situation, the
speaker feels the stress as the present scene shows either ruins or a “a gathering
of owls and ghosts,” where a line from a famous qaxldahby al-Mutanabblfits
well to bewail alienation and strangeness as the speaker “is a stranger in face
[brown and they are white-skinned in Bawwmn], capacity [as he uses the spear
as weapon], and language [as his language is Arabic].”^23 Yet, the same refer-
ence may not correspond well enough with the original which nevertheless
appreciates the beauty of the place in a poem that is addressed as a panegyric
to ‘A,ud al-Dawlah and his two sons. The second part recaptures the sense of
loss through a journey of political dimensions, as the speaker uses the arrival
as a pretext to recapitulate the meaning of loss. It establishes a filiatory bond
with the Palestinian poets and the community through physical and symbolic
communication:
Here I am, O beloved ones, extending my hand to yours... Raising my forehead to the sun, with you,
Here you are as hard and powerful as our mountains
As the roses of our homeland
This part covers journeying in a mixture of emotional and inflammatory rhet-
oric, as the speaking voice interfuses into the Palestinian national discourse,
its landmarks of defiance and struggle. The last part makes use of this
journeying, as it moves in a seasonal structure pattern from chaos and misery
to prospects of reintegration and jubilation. Although growing out of the
second part with its invitation to intimacy and integration there is a promise
to join in a struggle that transfigures words into action:
I go forward on the same route of yours,
Planting my steps into my homeland
Into my land like you...^24The poem makes cursory use of the traditional structure to retain a poetic
root that can substantiate the driving motivation of the poem as a national
song of defiance and struggle. As a dominant motif, the will to integrate, to
CONCLUSION: DEVIATIONAL AND REVERSAL POETICS