Illusions Among the Olive Trees

"On the western slope of Mount Gerizim, where the olive groves fill hearts and eyes — there I grew used to sitting, in the late afternoon of every day, beside a blessed olive tree whose shade bent tenderly over my soul, and whose supple branch-tips stroked my head; and how often I fancied that it returned my intimacy and my love, sensing what I sense and feeling what I feel... And in the shade of this poet olive tree... how many dreams I have dreamed... how many illusions I have imagined..."

Here, here, in the shade of my olive tree
the spirit shatters the fetters of the dust,
and the soul withdraws into a solitude
where silence chokes the idle chatter of mankind.

Here the heart roams through a world
created by my dim, unspoken dreams;
its horizon holds a splendor for my eyes,
and the visions murmur softly in my ears.

A world of heavenly longings
that releases my spirit into the wide open spaces,
weightless — no earth to bend its steps,
no body to break the wing.

Ah! Here there hovers over my seat,
out of the world of longings, a beloved spirit
whom my eyes have never seen... and yet he is
in my thoughts — O distant one so near!

In my illusion I almost see him with me...
flooding my heart with delicate tenderness,
soaring with it toward the heaven of love
on a wing of unfettered light.

My olive tree — God! — how many a stirring thought
my illusions have whispered to me!
And how many fantasies, passing through my mind,
your poet branches know...

Would that I knew: if tomorrow the hand of death
bears me away from you to my grave,
will you forget my sojourn here,
you who bend so tenderly over my heart?

Will you forget a heart whose secrets
your merciful branches treasured up?
God bless them... how often they crooned to its crying longings
and lulled them to rest!

My olive tree, by God, if after me
the wandering breeze comes drifting toward you,
then remember how its brimming, fragrant perfumes
once breathed upon us both.

Remember me whenever the late-afternoon sun
sets your green leaves glistening —
for how many a sunset I saw off
with a burning heart and weary eyes.

Alas — will the nights fold me away tomorrow,
and the dark graves enclose me?
Then where do the throbbings of love go,
and where the tremors of feeling?

And my heart's light, and the visions, and the hopes,
and this fire in my depths?!
Will they all vanish, scattered,
as if they had never set my being aflame?

Is there no returning for this heart —
to passion, to poetry, to the inspiration of imagination?
Will its kindled fire go out?
Ah, the wretchedness of the heart at such an end!

O Lord, when the hour of death has come
and my spirit is set free from my body's frame,
and rushes toward You, full of yearning,
drawn back to its first wellspring —

and when this body lies hostage to the dust,
a castaway in the tyrannous hands of decay —
then let Omnipotence raise up from my earth
an inspired, poet olive tree!

Its roots will drink from my frame —
still moist, even then, with rapture...
drinking in the lights of my heart...
and drawing from it the secret of the flame!

Until, O my Creator, when my elements
have filled its fibers and its roots,
it starts up, its leaves all trembling
with the burning of sense and the glow of feeling.

Nablus — Fadwa Tuqan