Mahmoud Darwish was thrust by a variety of coincidences, events, and historical circumstances into becoming the official re-memberer, or chronicler of Palestinian collective memory. Undoubtedly, this is a daunting task that would, sooner or later, drain the poeticity and creativity of any poet, but Darwish took the challenge head on and excelled in the many and rich ways in which he transformed this daunting ask into an aesthetic challenge. He used to say that he considered himself to be a "Trojan poet" whose text was lost. He was concerned with recollecting and reconstructing the lost voices exiled from the Homerian master narrative: "What can a poet do when confronted with the bulldozers of history. . . except guard language from being emptied of the voices of victims who ask for their share in tomorrow's memory." My paper attempts to trace and unpack some predominant topoi revolving around "return" and the poet's complex relationship to a past and present that are dialectically implicated in an ongoing struggle. It explores some of the modes and strategies through which Darwish reconstructs and remembers his home/land in his late poetry. How does Darwish grapple with memory and history and what textual strategies does he deploy to "rescue the memory of the victims"r It also finds echoes of some of Benjamin's notions about dynamic remembering and confronting triumphalist history in one of Darwish's late poems. Both Benjamin and Darwish were concerned with rescuing that "past which never had a chance to live, [but] lives on as a trace," to use Benjamin's words. The paper uses Benjamin's notion of the "now-time" and the figure of the materialist historian to read Darwish's "return poems" and suggest a more radical notion of the political future than the one previously detected by his readers.