قراءة كتاب The Singing Caravan A Sufi Tale
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اللغة: English
الصفحة رقم: 6
tongue.
III
THE DEPTH OF THE NIGHT
The watchman finished, as the southern gate
Clanged, and the breathless city lay behind.
The Dreamer's shadows shrank against the wall,
As though the desert called and none replied,
Till the young pilot, standing out to night,
Swung clear these lines to sound the depths of her:
"Blue Persian night,
Soft, voiceless as the summer sea!
Flooding the bouldered desert sand, submerge
This cypressed isle
And Demavend's snow-spire—a sunken rock
On your hushed floor, where I the diver stand
Beyond the reach of day.
And though, up through your overwhelming peace,
I see your surface, heaven,
I would not rise there, being drowned in you,
Blue Persian night.
"Blue Persian night,
O consolation of the East!
In your clear breathless oceanic sheen
My heart's an isle,
From whose innumerable caves and coigns—
When dusk awakes the city of my mind—
Exploring boats set forth,
Bound for the harbour-lights of God knows where,
Full, full of God knows what;
It must be love of Him, or Her, or You,
Blue Persian night."
Her signal answered; for a slender wand
Of moonbeam touched the Dreamer on the mouth.
The caravan looked upward with a shout
And set its camels rolling to the south,
Murmuring: "Blue Persian night, none ever saw
You through your own sheer purity before us.
Rise up our songs as bubbles from the sand ..."
Somewhere among the camels rose this chorus:
Dong! Dong!
Lurching along
Out of the dusk
Into the night.
Noiseless and lusty,
Dreamy and dusty,
Looms the long caravan-line into sight.
Dong! Dong!
Never a song,
Never a footfall
A breath or a sigh.
Ghostly and stolid,
Stately and squalid,
Creeps the monotonous caravan by.
Dong! Dong!
Fugitive throng.
Out of the dark
Into the night,
Silent and lonely,
Gone!... the bells only
Tells us a caravan once was in sight.
IV
THE INWARDNESS OF THE MERCHANT
Moussa, the son of the Crypto-Jew,
Had eaten his fill of yellow stew
And a bit besides (as a business man
He was far too quick for the caravan,
Who loved him not, though it feared his guile).
Moussa then: "I shall walk awhile
"To ease my soul of its heavy load."
His pious friends: "May you find a road,"
And winked. "His soul has begun to feel
There's nothing left but a march to steal."
But one from the village, decoying quail
For the governor's pot, came back with a tale
Of a lean arm shaken against the sky
Like a stunted thorn, and this piteous cry:
"As sound within an ice-bound desert mewed
Drags out existence at the very core
Of isolation, as breakers slip ashore
In vainly eternal whispers to the nude
Reef-coral, where no human feet intrude
Upon the purity of stillness; or
As, far from life, unmated eagles soar
Above the hilltops' breathless solitude,
"So moves my love, like these a thing apart,
Fierce, in the ruined temple of my heart,
Shy as a shooting star that peers new-risen
Mid strangers. Even so. Pent in the prison
Of space my soul, a lonely planet, wheels ...
Men call the sum of loneliness 'Ideals.'"
This is the plaint that the cross-road heard
Where it strikes from Kashan to Burujird.
The townsmen, met by the sun-dried stream,
Caught a voice high up like an angel's scream
Or a teaspoon tapping the bowl of heaven,
And they cried: "Ajab! May we be forgiven,
"But it sounds a soul of the rarer sort
Whose wings are set for no earthly port."
And the answer came, as they cried: "Who's that?"
"One that sells short weight in mutton fat."
V
THE LESSON OF THE CAMEL
Light was not. All was still. The caravan
Had ceased its song and motion by the bed
Wherein the hill-stream tosses sleeplessly,
The only sound, save one staccato note
Interminably piped by tiny owls.
The camp lay balmed in slumber, as the dead
Are straitened in white trappings. Then a voice,
Deeper than any dead black mountain