as “the goddess of paradox, she is the model of unity in multiplicity” (Ibid. 22).
This complexity offers the Palestinian poet Ma.mnd Darwlsh enough space
to dialogize. In his poem, the Sumerian Goddess evolves as the source for
poetic creativity, but in this process she becomes one with the real woman
whom he addresses:
For you, stretched out in the corridor in silk shirt and gray trousers,
and not for metaphors of you that I awaken my wilderness and tell myself
that a moon will rise from my darkness.
Let the water rain down upon us from the Sumerian sky as it does in
myths.
If my heart is sound, like the glass around us, fill it with your clouds
(Unfortunately it was paradise, p.110)The poem evokes the Sumerian procession, and recalls mythical scenes of
rapture and joy to endow the addressee’s real situation with benedictions of
life and fertility. Yet, the contrast between the recreated Sumerian scene and
the actual one is sharp and disheartening. The abrupt change from the poetic
to the prosaic, from the lyrical to the actual scene, “Takea cup ofhot chamomile
andtwo aspirin,” is intentional, as it demystifies the mythical aura, and brings
the scene back to its human limits, where there is also trouble and sickness.
The conversational tone broadens the scope of poetry, and involves it into
multiplevoicing.
Let us finish it here on the edge of the earth
in the place brought down by your hands
from the balcony of the vanishing paradise.
For you, reading the newspaper in the hallway, fighting the flu,
I say: Takea cup ofhot chamomile andtwo aspirin,
so that lnanna’s milk may settlein you
and we may know what timeit is
at the meeting of theTwo Rivers.
(Ibid. 112)With this new discovery of the Sumerian poetry, poets find another
source to bring poetry and its traditions back to life. As Sumerian poetry and
songs have a surprising connection to life styles, customs, and historical hap-
penings, modernist poets, like Darwlsh and the Iraqi Shawql‘Abd al-Amlr
are no longer tied to mythical superimpositions as their Tammnzlforebears.
Poetry in the Sumerian lore humanizes gods and depicts them in their differ-
ences and arguments like the rest of the people who are the subject of poetry.
In Shawql‘Abd al-Amlr’s poem “I.timmlmt” (Probable cases 1998), the poet
makes use of the original Sumerian song, with its mythical underpinnings
and markers, for these reflect strongly on the situation in Iraq in the 1990s.
POETIC DIALOGIZATION