Of My Country

Alone am I here, in an east of the worlds;
I poured out for the light the perfumes of contentment, believing:
and the hill budded, and the shore, and the bend of the vale,
and I wrapped myself in narcissus, and girded myself with lily.

And it came to pass that the hand of the nights lavished fortune,
and crowned my brow, above all mankind, with glory,
and made fertile wherever my footstep journeyed by night and by morning
with goodness — as if guidance, since first it was, had been created in me.

Many an age gone by, I wove the mantle of loftiness,
and from the arm of eternity a loom was stretched out for me;
and the unseen spoke plain, when I willed it, and stood revealed,
and the horizon of the distance fell back from my procession, startled.

I am a wing, and the range of my play is on the summits,
and wherever my course was traced I made it flow, a Kawthar:
a wave rejoiced, and the soil laughed up at me,
and it was said: but for me, mankind would not have known what it knows...