The Butterfly Effect

The butterfly effect is seen / The butterfly effect / The butterfly effect does not disappear / It is a mysterious attraction / That lures the meaning, and departs / Where the path becomes clear / It is the lightness of the eternal in the daily / And longings for the highest / And a beautiful radiance / It is a mole in the light that beckons / When it guides us to the words / Our inner guide / It is like a song that tries / To say, and is satisfied / With quoting from the shadows / And does not say .. / The butterfly effect is not seen / The butterfly effect does not disappear.

In this text, “The Butterfly Effect,” Mahmoud Darwish seeks to create and build it through the word “butterfly” that he repeats, forming symbolic images to indicate existence and life, and their victory over death in its various forms, but in various images and different meanings hidden within the text, and this repetition plays a major role in poetic discourse and its elevation to express the beauty of natural things, like the beauty of the butterfly that will go about its business freely, by its own whim, continuing to arrange the chaos of existence.
Under the title “The Butterfly Effect” we find selected pages from Mahmoud Darwish’s diaries written between the summer of 2006 and the summer of 2007. It includes prose poems under the following titles: “The Girl / The Scream”, “Green Flies”, “Like a Prose Poem”, “If Only I Were a Stone”, “Beyond Identification”, “The Enemy”, “Nero”, “The Forest”, “Murdered”, “The Cunning of Metaphor”, “At a Low Altitude” (…) and other poems.