JEFFREY BROWN: Amid the inescapable politics, perhaps the most personal poetic voice we found belongs to this man, Taha Muhammad Ali, a self-described half-shopkeeper/half-poet.For decades, Muhammad Ali has run a small souvenir shops just steps from the Basilica of the Annunciation in Nazareth, selling religious trinkets and other items to the pilgrims, who come to this town by the busload.
Nazareth, where the church bells compete with the calls to prayer from the mosques, is a predominantly Arab city of Muslims and Christians within Israel. Taha Muhammad Ali came here as a boy, after his family's home in a nearby village was destroyed in the 1948 war.
With just a fourth-grade education, he is a self-taught man, a voracious reader who quotes Steinbeck and Shakespeare, as well as classical Arabic poetry. He decided to be a writer as a boy, and worked daily to make it happen.
TAHA MUHAMMAD ALI: I thought that, if I want to express myself, I have to know what is poetry and what is good poetry. And this went together, reading and trying to write.
JEFFREY BROWN: In one short poem translated as "Where," he writes that poetry hides.
So, poetry hides. How do you find it?
TAHA MUHAMMAD ALI: You have to take the pen and to take a paper, and to be ready to wait for him. Otherwise, he will come and you are not there. As a writer, you have to train yourself to write. Write anything, but every day.
JEFFREY BROWN: Muhammad Ali's work has been translated and made available to an English-speaking audience by Peter Cole, an American poet and publisher who's lived in Jerusalem for 20 years.
Cole's wife, Adina Hoffman, is now writing a biography of the poet. A new selection of poetry, "So What," was published last year. While Ghassan Zaqtan spoke to us about two competing narratives in the Mideast, one Palestinian and the other Israeli, Muhammad Ali breaks down the world of words in a different way.
TAHA MUHAMMAD ALI: I think there is two kinds of language, one for the news, for the politicians, and this is broad, and one for poetry. And this is beautiful and descriptive. And they are different, very different languages.
JEFFREY BROWN: Muhammad Ali insists that his poetry does speak to the conflict around him, but indirectly.
TAHA MUHAMMAD ALI: In my poetry, there is no Palestine, no Israel. But, in my poetry, suffering, sadness, longing, fear, and this is, together, make the results: Palestine and Israel. The art is to take from life something real, then to build it anew with your imagination.
JEFFREY BROWN: He illustrated how this works with a short passage from his poem "Twigs."
TAHA MUHAMMAD ALI (through translator): "And, so, it has taken me all of 60 years to understand that water is the finest drink and bread the most delicious food, and that art is worthless unless it plants a measure of splendor in people's hearts."
JEFFREY BROWN: Poets have no tanks or guns, Taha Muhammad Ali told us; they have only beautiful words.
No one we met believed that beautiful words alone would change the world, but Samih Al-Qasim told us poetry can keep the language from becoming insane.
"It is my salvation," he says, "and I think it is the salvation of many other people."
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