Weddings

In his poetry collection “Weddings”, the poet Mahmoud Darwish works on the narrative technique (internal dialogue) as part of its mission to build and shape the event that is – the wedding – which has turned into a funeral, so that the poem restores the heat of the poetic event and experience again, and transforms the vocabulary and meanings into another image that completely rejects the occupation and its barbarism that steals moments of joy. The poet says: “A lover comes from the war to the wedding day / Wears his first suit / And enters / The dance floor on a horse / Of enthusiasm and carnations / (…) And on the roof of ululations come the planes / Planes … Planes / Snatching the lover from the embrace of the butterfly / And mourning handkerchiefs / And the girls sing / I got married / All the girls got married / Oh Muhammad! / And I spent the first night / On the tiles of Haifa / (…) / And the country got married / Oh Muhammad! / Oh Muhammad! /”. In this sense, the poetic self and the joy and sorrow that befall it and what colors its vision of life and things become the center of poetic gravity and the focus of Mahmoud Darwish’s world. The collection (Weddings) was published in the year (1977), and includes a number of poems in modern Arabic poetry: “Weddings”, “What Was”, “Ahmed Al-Zaatar”, “The Sand Poem”, “The Bread Poem”, “The Earth Poem”, “An Ode to the Green”, “And He Carried the Burden of the Butterfly”, “The Sleeping Modern Woman”. As for the second section of the collection, the poet gave it a special title (States and Intervals) and includes: 1- Thus Said the Neglected Tree, 2- The One O’Clock Train, -3- For Another Evening, 4- A Blue Sunday, 5- One Case for Many Seas, 6- The Last Neighing.