like a balcony

refer to page 55 if you have the book. (:

A majority of Darwish's poems give off a vibe of calmness in the bones (despite how violent some poems may be). I especially felt that in "I See My Ghost Coming from Afar"; if you've ever read "Tintern Abbey" by William Wordsworth, I think it has the same sense of calmness (English major trying to relate things with each other, hahah). Even as the poem progresses with the questioning of what is to come of his home and of himself, the intensity of his emotions is mixed with the idea of "gaze." When I hear/see the word gaze, I think of the immobility of someone who is "stuck" in a moment. Hypnotized, maybe?

And he repeatedly states the line "Like a balcony, I gaze upon whatever I desire," bring me to the cover of the book, which is a landscape of his home (it is his home, right?), and I thought of how someone would "gaze" into the day/night reflecting upon multiple memories and thoughts, which Darwish lists in the poem. This whole idea of gazing just draws me to think about what it means to be gazing at something, I guess. Is it mesmerizing? Something that you can't take your eyes (or mind) off? Because in the end, Darwish has made a list of things that people often don't think much about, yet he points all of it out in the poem from the "Persian flower" to the questioning of "a new prophet for this new time." What may not be daunting to one person is quite daunting to another, basically. When he ends the poem with "I see my ghost coming from afar," I took it as him seeing his death coming soon, which was written in a strikingly haunting way. I don't know how obvious it was, but I did have to think about that for awhile.