Enter “Butterfly’s Burden”
By Dalia Taha
Translated by Sara Elkamel
for Mahmoud Darwish
I picked up “The Butterfly’s Burden”
and could not put it down.
Every poem I read, I read again,
and it was that way for days.
Poetry possesses this power.
You can read the same poem
a thousand times,
and always find dew on the words.
In poetry, I found language in the war
where every word
had lost its meaning,
save for enough.
In the book with a dead poet’s
photo on the cover,
every words was where
it had always been,
and very much alive—
and they voiced what no one else
could say: You can start your day
without words
and end it
without words.
You can start the day with fog
and stay right there.
Dalia Taha is a Palestinian poet, playwright, and educator. She was awarded the 2024 Banipal Visiting Author Fellowship in recognition of her literary achievements. Taha has published three poetry collections, a novel, two plays, and a children’s poetry collection. Her plays have been staged at the Royal Court Theatre in London and the Flemish Royal Theatre in Brussels, among others. Taha teaches at both Birzeit University and AlQuds Bard University. She works and lives in Ramallah.
Sara Elkamel is a poet, journalist, and translator based in Cairo. She holds an MA in arts journalism from Columbia University and an MFA in poetry from New York University. Her poems have appeared in Poetry Magazine, Ploughshares, The Yale Review, Gulf Coast, The Iowa Review, among other publications. A Pushcart Prize winner, Elkamel was also awarded the Michigan Quarterly Review’s 2022 Goldstein Poetry Prize, Tinderbox Poetry Journal’s 2022 Brett Elizabeth Jenkins Poetry Prize, and Redivider’s 2021 Blurred Genre Contest. She is the author of the chapbook Field of No Justice (African Poetry Book Fund & Akashic Books, 2021).
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