My Son!

"The father's circumstances decreed that he live far from his family, working in one country while his family lives in another, seeing them, or being with his infant son, only rarely. In one of those storms of the soul that sweep over him whenever the memory of his home and his son crosses his mind, he let his tears flow onto the nib of his pen, and from his heart there poured a wounded, sorrowing feeling. Hence this piece!"

O piece of my very flesh cut from my body, O ray of hope shining out from my soul, I whisper to you!

Does your heart quicken at a broken voice that pierces the far, wide horizon, in the hope that it may reach your innocent, unstained senses?

O smile of promise among my wishes, O phantom of bliss in my dreams — distance from you has broken me down, and being deprived of you has torn my young ribs apart.

By your Lord, tell me: was fate a jealous censurer to you, that it raised between me and you the walls of separation, to keep me for itself and make of itself a narrow cage for my soul?

In the pitch-black nights I toss in my bed upon the embers of longing; the bitterness of yearning seethes in my ribs, and the fire of passion and of distance blazes in my feeling; my sorrowful heart sinks in upon itself, and my senses dwindle step by step with its dwindling, until it all but vanishes, and I fancy it drawing near its grave...

O light of my eyes, cause of the living beat in my side, and intoxication of the joyous melody in my ears — how far from me is the virgin nectar on your lips, and how far from me the dewy honey crystallized upon your cheeks?!...

Tomorrow you will not remember the day I bade you farewell for the first time — you had not yet completed the first year of your life — after the necessity of earning a livelihood had struck me with its unerring arrows and decreed my distance from you — when the tears burst from my two grudging eyes, and a burning tear struck the slope of your cheek, as though it were the bugle call for your own tears; and you shed them meekly, and shrank back where you stood, forlorn, and your lips murmured, with a heartrending faintness, the call of fatherhood rising from the depths of your pure soul; and you turned your gaze away from me, to escape the meeting of our glances and to stay in my eyes the storm of tears.

And I still remember how you heaved the sigh of one broken-hearted and heavy-breasted, adding to my heart the anguish of parting; and how I went down the stairs of the house, after pressing a kiss of blessing upon your radiant brow, my hand clasping your mother's hand with a warmth that begged for mercy, and a pleading that begged for pity; and the tear stood in her eyes and glistened, and her lips parted in a smile that reassured — and a bitterness that stirred the hidden wells of tenderness.

My son! I am far from you; my heart brims over with pent-up tenderness, and your soul brims over with longing for tenderness.

And I see you, with the eye of fancy, trying to give delight and to take it, while in the lines of your face there is a faint smile over the pallor of absence, and in the steadiness of your gaze a will that wants for no consolation over my being denied you.

And it is enough for me to see you with my inward eye, on the stage of my dreams, as I would long to see you were I at your side. And it is enough for me that I wake in my land of exile every morning to your sweet voice ringing in my ear, conquering the distance of the miles, calling to what in me is wounded of soul!...