...his epic poem, Midnight, speaks movingly about memories of home.

The poem evolves as a bleak cycle of life and death:

loved ones line up to die like the buttons of a shirt
lining up with their buttonholes[...]

Yet there is joy here too, if only in Barghouti's language, beautifully translated by his wife Radwa Ashour:

I, who saw a boy the size of a bouquet of jasmine
chasing a tank
the size of history