Palestinians gather as the coffin of Mahmoud Darwish drives past during the funeral procession in the West Bank city of Ramallah. Palestinians gave their national poet Darwish what amounted to a state funeral in Ramallah, mourning a man whose work voiced their sense of loss, exile and defiance. (Luay Sababa, Maan Images)

There are few clues to help locate the cemetery of al Birwa.

Its unmarked entrance is at the end of a dirt track, and most of the gravestones are strewn across untended, rocky ground.

The brittle, sun-blasted stalks of Galilee thistle that shoot up from the ground here each spring are the only reliable visitors.

This is the spot, close to the coastal city of Acre in northern Israel, where the family of Mahmoud Darwish, Palestine's "national poet", said he would have chosen to be buried.

Instead, after his death on Saturday at age 67 on the operating table of a Houston hospital, he is due to be laid to rest today in Ramallah in the West Bank.

Darwish's body was to be flown to Amman from the United States in a plane sent by Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed, President of the UAE and Ruler of Abu Dhabi, said Atallah Kheiry, the Palestinian ambassador to Jordan.

A ceremony is to be held at Amman's Marka military airport this morning before Darwish's remains are flown to Ramallah on a Jordanian military helicopter for the funeral.

Al Birwa, the village where Darwish spent his earliest years, exists today as little more than a memory - even if one immortalised in his poetry. Its buildings were razed by the Israeli army during the war of 1948 that established the state of Israel by sending 750,000 Palestinians into exile. At age seven, Darwish and his family were forced to flee to Lebanon.

During his life Darwish was only too aware that he would not be allowed by the Israeli authorities to return to his village - even in death.

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For six decades, access to the cemetery has been controlled by two exclusive Jewish communities, Yasur and Achihud, which were given possession of the village's extensive lands.

Darwish wrote simply in his will that he wished to be "buried in Palestine".

In an interview last year, he recalled with fondness his boyhood in Birwa, suggesting how powerful an influence it was on the poetry of loss and exile that made him famous.

"I prefer to store the memories that still linger of open spaces, fields and watermelons, olive and almond trees," he told Haaretz, an Israeli newspaper. "I remember the horse that was tied to the mulberry tree in the yard and how I climbed on to it and was thrown off and got a beating from my mother... I remember the butterflies and the clear feeling that everything was open. The village stood on a hill, and everything was spread out below."

Since Darwish's death, his family has sat in the traditional mourning tent in Judeidi, the Arab village in Israel that became their home. Only a few minutes by car from al Birwa, Judeidi was as close as the Darwishes could get to their former land.

Standing under tarpaulins stretched across the family's yard, Ahmed, Darwish's elder brother, greeted a steady flow of those wishing to pay their respects. "There has been much discussion about where Mahmoud should be laid to rest," he said.

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