Najwan Darwish’s new book No One Will Know You Tomorrow is a selection of the exquisite, passionate verse of the Palestinian poet Najwan Darwish, superbly translated into English by poet-translator Kareem Abu Zeid. Finalist for the 2025 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation.
Najwan Darwish
The poet in his own words, on poetry, love and loss.
Three poems from No One Will Know You Tomorrow, translated from Arabic by Kareem Abu Zeid. Born in Jerusalem in 1978, Najwan Darwish is one of the most important poets of the Arabic-speaking world. This definitive collection, which draws from five volumes published in Arabic as well as new unpublished work, brings to English-language readers a sweeping trove of Darwish’s most powerful and urgent poetry of the last decade.
In spare lyric verse, Darwish testifies to the brutal and intimate traumas of war, the anguished fatigue of waking up each morning in an occupied land, and the immeasurable toll of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. While anchored in the geography of Palestine, his poetry also explores the rich artistic inheritance of the Arabic-speaking world, moving between regions, landscapes, and eras, from the glories of medieval Granada to the rippling shores of contemporary Haifa. In dialogue with poets, philosophers, and seekers from many different traditions, Darwish’s verse pulses with spiritual longing and a sense of battered, disoriented wonder—a witness to both the atrocities we visit upon one another and the miracle that we are here at all.
No One Will Know You Tomorrow is a tribute to the indomitability of the human spirit: its sensitive attunement to beauty and its endurance in the face of unspeakable tragedy.
A Verse by Hafez Ibrahim
on the Shore of Haifa
Like a kid in third grade whose teacher was murdered,
I walked in the darkness,
abandoned on the shore after midnight,
crying out:
“I’m the sea, and the pearls are hidden within me.
Did they ask the divers about my shells?”
I kept shouting it,
waiting for the gods to hear me:
“I’m the sea,
and the pearls are hidden within me.”
My teacher was murdered
and I’ll keep reciting the verse, hopelessly,
until the gods hear me
and reply.
I’m not sad
and I’m not afraid
and I don’t care
that I’ve been abandoned on a dark shore.
“I’m the sea, and the pearls
are hidden within me.”
Do the shells feel pride?
Do the fish remember
the ship’s melodies?
And what sea is this
coming at me
dressed like a trusted advisor:
“They’ll arrest you if you keep screaming in Arabic.
They’ll open fire.
Stop it, please: I’m tired of your blood
spilling on my shore.”
Who would I be if I stopped?
I’ll keep on—
even if the gods hear me,
even if they reply.
Days of Hell
While we were in hell
we couldn’t say
that we were in hell,
and that was the worst of it.
To this very moment
it still seems so absurd—
our belated confession.
We Never Stop
I have no country to return to,
no country to be banished from,
a tree whose roots
are a running river:
it dies if it stops,
it dies if it doesn’t.
On the cheeks and arms of death
I spend the best of my days,
and the land I lost each day
I gained each day and you.
The people had a single country,
but mine multiplied in loss,
renewed itself in absence.
It’s roots, like mine, or water:
If it stops it withers,
if it stops it dies.
Both of us are running
with a river of sunbeams,
a river of gold dust
that rises from ancient wounds,
and we never stop.
We keep on,
never thinking to pause,
so our two paths can meet.
I have no country to be banished from,
no country to return to:
I’ll die if I stop,
I’ll die if I keep going.
Tears were shed. Beautiful work.