Darwish's Idea of "Home"

First of all, each of Darwish's poems struck me because each deals with his explorations of definitions: definitions of "home," "stranger," "company." He is constantly exploring what these words, these themes, mean to him. We witness how they change throughout his poems. Home was once a place of comfort, a place his memory could easily go to to ease his troubles. But then we see him contemplating this age-old image. His perception of home changes as it gets infected with thoughts of war, Communism, death. He no longer has a home at this point. This got me thinking about our homeland poems and how some of us feel misplaced from our true homelands, and how we find ourselves in an America that we find tainted with similar ideas that do not create the fluffy image of home. For this reason I found his poems to be REAL. I could understand what he felt like without being there, what he thought without experiencing his troubles. I can say that just like Darwish, I no longer feel attached to the land here either. My attachment lies elsewhere. And in one of the poems when he is speaking to a stranger through a sort of made up dialogue (I think that's what was going on..) it reminded me of how we use poems as our "strangers," and how we speak through our poems, to our poems, and with our poems. I really enjoyed his work as a whole, it felt relate-able in a universal sense.