قراءة كتاب The Singing Caravan A Sufi Tale
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اللغة: English
الصفحة رقم: 3
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PRELUDE
The sun smote Elburz like a gong.
Slow down the mountain's molten face
Zigzagged the caravan of song.
Time was its slave and went its pace.
It bore a white Transcaspian Queen
Whose barque had touched at Enzelí.
Splendid in jewelled palanquin
She cleft Iran from sea to sea,
Bound for the Persian Gulf of Pearls,
Where demons sail for drifting isles
With bodyguards of dancing girls
And four tamed winds for music, smiles
For passports. Thus the caravan,
Singing from chief to charvadar,
Reached the great gate of screened Tehran.
The burrows of the dim bazaar
Swarmed thick to see the vision pass
On broidered camels like a fleet
Of swaying silence. One there was
Who joined the strangers in the street.
They called him Dreamer-of-the-Age,
The least of Allah's Muslimeen
Who knew the joys of pilgrimage
And wore the sign of sacred green,
A poet, poor and wistful-eyed.
Him all the beauty and the song
Drew by swift magic to her side,
And in a trance he went along
Past friends who questioned of his goal:
"The Brazen Cliffs? The Realms of Musk?
Goes he to Mecca for his soul?..."
The town-light dwindled in the dusk
Behind. Ahead Misr? El Katíf?
The moon far up a brine-green sky
Made Demavend a huge pale reef
Set in an ocean long gone dry.
Bleached mosques like dwarf cave-stalagmites,
Smooth silver-bouldered biyaban
And sevenfold velvet of white nights
Vied with the singing caravan
To make her pathway plain.
Then one
Beside the poet murmured low:
"I plod behind, sun after sun,
O master, whither do we go?
"Are we for some palmed port of Fars,
Or tombed Kerbela, or Baghdad
The Town-of-Knowledge-of-the-Stars?
Is worship wise or are we mad?"
Answered the poet: "Do we ask
Allah to buy each Friday's throng?
None to whom worship is a task
Should join the caravan of song.
"With heart and eyes unquestioning, friend,
We follow love from sea to sea,
And Love and Prayer have common end:
'May God be merciful to me!'"
So fared they, camped from noon to even,
Till dawn, quick-groping through the gloom,
Pounced on gilt planets low in heaven.
Thus they beheld the domes of Kum.
And onward nightly. Though the dust
Swirled in dread shapes of desert Jinn,
Ever the footsore poet's trust
Soared to the jewelled palanquin,
Parched, but still singing: "God, being great,
Lent me a star from sea to sea,
The drop in his hand-hollow, Fate.
He holds it high, and signs to me
"Although She—She may not ..."
"For thirst
My songs and dreams like mirage fail.
Yea, mad "—his fellow pilgrim cursed—
"I was. The Queen lifts not her veil."
"Put no conditions to her glance,
O happy desert, where the guide
Is Love's own self, Life's only chance ..."
He saw not where the other died,
But pressed on strongly, loth to halt
At Persia's pride, Rose-Ispahan,
Whose hawks are bathed in pure cobalt.
To meet the singing caravan
Came henna-bearded prince and sage
With henna-fingered houris, who
Strove to retard the pilgrimage,
Saying: "Our streets are fair and you
"A poet. Sing of us instead.
God may be good, but life is short.
Yon are the mountains of the dead.
Here are clean