Why Did You Leave the Horse Alone?

At once an intimate autobiography and a collective memory of the Palestinian people, Darwish’s interlinked poems are collective cries, songs, and glimpses of the human condition. Why Did You Leave the Horse Alone?(considered by many his chef-d’oeuvre) is a poetry of myth and history, of exile and suspended time, of an identity bound to his displaced people and to the rich Arabic language. Darwish’s poems — specific and symbolic, simple and profound — are historical glimpses, existential queries, chants of pain and injustice of a people separated from their land.