04. Ode to Night.
Night: shoreless shadowed stormwracked sea;
the sphere of Night: a desert of roses smeared with indigo.
Slopes, hillocks, high places stand still and silent
as terminal giants hunched in cureless melancholy.
Heaven has washed its face in tar and rests unmoving
as if God the Singular had never created it.
Wilderness, bewildered with sadness, grows no lighter
with the bilious dawn. Rays of light
cannot move from eyes to touch faces,
echoes cannot find their way to any ear
as if Earth the Sorcerer had taken existence away
from all things and left the whirling sky a lunatic.
The Empyrean grinds to a halt - one might think
in all the world no creature stirs or breathes.
Under the narrow ebon canopy of night I open my eye
- nothing. I close my eye upon no dream.
My physical eye looks upon night, the eye of my heart
looks upon the void, like a lonely sentinel
in the midst of the sleeping army. My physical eye
sees the stars as vigilant guards. The heart s eye
sees no one awake, no wiseman, no sage.
The stars: a paradise of black-eyed girls;
the clouds part and reveal their smiling eyes
like a bit of luck amidst the general bane -
Go, have a look: the Pleiades, cluster of white roses
shining in dark grass like lost gems of ancient kings;
Capella s bloodshot eye in the West, like a bersker
staring down in foe; Jupiter like Joseph
in the inky well, Venus pale and perplexed as Zulaikha;
the sky, Mary s jewel-encrusted tabernacle;
stars like monks, the Hyades a crucifix.
My eye, ear, heart, breathlessly wake, hoping
for a streak of dawn, a sound in that terrible stillness,
for if my soul forgets, my learned intellect recalls
that in all the Universe, nothing begins but comes to an end.
Night s raven crosses the boundary from Jabulsa to Jabulkqa,
dawn rises at last, a griffon from a ruby s heart,
legions of darkness flea before the ranks of morning
as error dissipated before Truth s face;
the stars blush like maidens in purdah
caught by their mothers without their veils,
and fall, fall headlong into the Sun, as in the end
all parts rejoin the Whole at last.
Ah, Nasir, you speak too much of stars and night;
look in your wisdom on the world s affairs;
the universe, a sea of eloquent pearls,
the Ocean of Time, men its frail ships.
Praise God, Who makes His ablutions and shakes
the water from His hands, which falls
into the heavens, each drop a star.
The constellations of good fortune are nothing
without the light of His face; the skies
have no breadth but in His Kingdom s expanse.
Such ranks He bestows on me in His generosity
no sage before me is wise, no prince sublime.
From this world I seek but fellowship in Faith,
companions such as never Heaven not earth have known.
I praise the peerless Lord, the Almighty Friend
from Whom all power flows. I have woven
a silk brocade and sewn it with Wisdom
such as never left the looms of Byzantium;
I have raised a tree, fresh and tall as the Ash of Paradise,
every leaf a gold word, every line sweet as a date.
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