Darwish (1942-2008), recipient of France s Knight of Arts and Belles Lettres medal, the Lotus Prize, and the Lannan Foundation Prize for Cultural Freedom, is widely considered Palestine s most eminent poet. State of Siege was written while the poet himself was under siege in Ramallah during the Israeli invasion of 2002. An eloquent and impassioned response to political extremity, the collection was published to great acclaim in the Arab world. Akash and Moore s translation, including an introduction by Akash exploring the rich mythology of these poems, presents the first book-length, bilingual edition of State of Siege to an English audience.

"Excess of sorrow laughs. Excess of joy weeps."(William Blake) A cooly impassioned, and "pathward" adventurous series of poems joining two modes of enlightenment, Buddhist and Sufi, that may in many ways be parallel-from my sitting with saintly Shunryu Suzuki of the San Francisco Zen Center in the early 60s, and my blessed time with Qutb Shaykh ibn al-Habib of Fez in Meknes, Morocco, in the 1970s, may Allah be pleased with both of them. Are the two protagonists of these poems the main characters in Waiting for Godot, now no longer waiting, but there? Exalted humor lightens our spiritual endeavors.

These are poems written over nearly a year in 1996, ecstatic, bewildered, exploratory, celebratory, remembering Allah in all the usual and unusual places, seeing (God willing) His Light through all things, people and places. A trajectory arc of heart over and through time. Hoping by these flights to acknowledge His Generosity to us in adversity and peace.

A grand outgoing, heading directly into the puzzlement, the puzzle, puzzling it all out... Poems of search and devotion to the One, through labyrinthine manifestations... self and its various sheddings.

There are among us luminous beings who maintain that what we might taste of the Garden of Paradise and what we might suffer of the Fire of Hell is right here in our present earthly and mortal existence as well. The imaginal truth of the Spiritual Path that points to the Next World after death is perhaps indisputable (however some might vigorously dispute it) but our lives, upon reflection, sometimes thrown overboard and barely making it to shore, sometimes buoyed up very high and slammed down very low and hard, are a living proof of the this-world tasting of the Next World experience...

The luster of a glisten is/enough to elicit bliss//The gleam from a beam/enough to confound the intellect//The crack of a rock in a creek/can take us back to where//we lost track//The whiff of a sniff can lift/even the most morose heart//from the hotbed of heartbreak//All these phenomena/splinter and splatter in//this world to focus from the/unseen world onto this one//some hint of the high rainbowing/laughter to come...

Somehow the resonance for me during the entertaining of this title as an abiding albeit background theme for the poems, was the perfect crime of our existence: perfect because created by a perfect Creator. A crime because we get up to such malfeasance all the time, at the lower end of it, and a crime at the higher end in the sense that the Sufis often mention, that any existence of theirs before Allah ta'ala, any flake or residue of their self-ness, is a crime, a flaw, an obstruction before the Light of God. Only when you have known a saint (wali) of whatever spiritual practice do you the sense of a personality honed to its finest before the divine consciousness, whose actions and words and thoughts are soaked in divinity to such a degree that the person is truly human in its essence and effaced before God in His ever-present and infinitely Merciful activity.

Chants for the Beauty Feast are poems in celebration of our breathing, living, daring and imaginal beauty, in this world with all its aches and pangs, and the next and the Unseen world with its intersections into and throughout this one, divinely directed. Light everywhere moving with relentless bliss.

This may be a secret among only a few of its recipients, but cancer is a direct and positive gift from God. Its chemo and radiation therapies wrack and ruin us... and its alternative therapies may bewilder us with the arcane and often whacky character of their methods... I chose the traditional medical program of three chemo and thirty-five radiation sessions, begun immediately after diagnosis of my cancer, and I praise Allah for the doctors who treated me with their medicine chest of tough love. _________________ Redemption happens the way/ water falls/ Forgiveness is air/ let into an airless room/ Even at the top of the highest peak/ we can't just step off into the sky/ At some point only God's Love has any reality/ and everything hangs enraptured from that ferocious hook/ Streams of light continue to enter us from we/ know now where/ The truth of our beings/ light streaming everywhere

Try to describe light and it's hopeless/ Nothing can quite catch in words luminous nothingness/ Hold something up in light and it's revealed in it say a/ miniature Easter Island head now brought out in its/ full strangeness by the surrounding illumination/ But how can you hold up something like light in light and hope to achieve/ the thing the flash the flat surrounding splashy airiness of brightness/ in whose beneficence everything/ including us is revealed?...

In all the poems of a poet's work there's the impulse to get to the bottom of things, to the original energy pulse, the first cause as it manifests in the present tense, the spark off the main strike. As always, the title came to me first, and the poems followed, some faithful some astray from the theme, but always rebounding back again to resonate with that original strike, in these scattered sparks.