The Last Flower atop Memory’s Stone
By Fadwa Tuqan
Translated by Adey Almohsen
What follows is a short poem by Fadwa Tuqan, one of Palestine’s most eminent poets. The poem did not make it to her collected works as compiled by Dār al-‘Awdah and appears to have only been published by Beirut’s Shi‘r magazine in 1959. Tuqan was one of several Palestinians who regularly contributed to Shi‘r and participated in its weekly salon (khamīs shi‘r). Others include Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, Tawfīq Ṣāyigh, Thurayyā Malḥas, Salma Jayyusi, and, a little later, Mahmoud Darwish. Given this sizable Palestinian presence, I think it necessary to examine Shi‘r as a forum of Palestinian intellectual and literary history.
The poem itself exemplifies a spirit—uncommon neither for the time nor for the magazine’s cohort—that struggled to break free from past delusions and memories, despite their seductive pull. The 1947–9 Nakba not only incited such a sense of disillusionment within Tuqan and her co-nationals, but, significantly, having shattered them as do “furious, stormy winds,” made the tasks of self-reconstitution and national resuscitation all the more urgent, all the more existential. -Adey Almohsen
It was a delusion which we gave shape and life,
and then quenched with color and perfume.
We adored it. Adored our precious, profuse delusion,
and confined yearning to its horizon of sight.
It was a delusion, which inhabited us for a short moment.
So, we endowed it with imagination and sentiment.
And graced it with light, shades,
soaring hopes, and countless dreams.
On rainy nights, warmth drew us to it—a temple that
passion’s fecundity satiated with poetry and art.
On wings of reverie, we circumambulated it,
and at its inner sanctum we prostrated.
We recited;
oh, how many verses of love we recited to it.
And, oh, how very long we played to it
tunes of the great rapture.
It then faded one night,
when blew furious, stormy winds that blight.
It faded, leaving behind nothing but
a memory, laden by so many a cut.
Some of a memory,
for which we readied a grave and shroud.
Burying it silently, and heaping parable upon it.
And atop its stone, we laid the last flower
that scented poetry through death’s climes.
The Arabic original ran in Shi‘r 3, no. 1 (1959). Above image is from the Library of Congress.
Fadwa Tuqan (1917–2003) was a poet from Nablus. She was among the most celebrated Palestinian and Arab poets of the twentieth century with many poetry volumes and books to her name.
Adey Almohsen is an intellectual historian of the Arab world from the late eighteenth century to the present. He is completing a book titled, In the Nakba’s Wake: An Intellectual History of Palestine. He is a senior lecturer in history at Grinnell College and a 2025 fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS).