Ghalwa' — how sweet her perfumed name!

A young girl whom the maidens envy;

no poet could ever fashion

a poem with an opening lovelier than she:

Picture the flowers in blossom-time

freshened by the shiver of the lights;

picture the morning breeze

clipping the stalks of jasmine and daisies;

picture the sky in its splendor,

like dreams in their clarity;

picture the grasses on the mountains

dreaming in a cradle of shadows;

picture the lovely banner

whose color is a shadow of the thicket;

and the heaps of snow upon the hills

with the yellow of sunset floating over them —

then cast, at the last, one swift glance

over all the varied beauty in nature,

and you will know, with the highest knowledge,

how heaven created Ghalwa'.

*

And the voice of the saintly priest

was melting the spirit of God into souls;

and when he delivered the Gospel sermon

into the hearing of the old and the aging,

he said in a humble voice: 'Our Father,

send down upon Your peoples forgiveness!'

*

Then a glance darted from his eye

backward, and he saw his girl —

Ghalwa' of the secret pain,

of the weary, wretched conscience,

of the love defiled and pure,

reading in her little book

as though she were reading in a conscience

tormented, its lines aflame,

and now raising a dreaming eye

to the incense fading into the sky of the chapel corner —

and her breath, like it, fading away

in flutters and in trembling,

like the trembling of butterflies

in the air when their weddings end,

or like the mist on an autumn evening

dissolving in its faint shiver.

And he said: 'What can she fear, I wonder? What ails her,

that now the darkness of her turmoil floods over her,

and now she turns away from her book?'

And the prayer ended in the temple of God,

and the crowd went out,

and Ghalwa' remained, with grief and misery,

in the deserted sanctuary,

like a candle still alight

among the extinguished candles of the altar.

She was praying!.. and the dolls of the morning

peered from the window-slits in a veil

perfumed with jasmine and daisies.

*

O conquerors over all the earth,

O drinkers of the cup of blood,

O you who stare at the universe in scorn

through the deaf shells

and the blood of the weak and the innocent:

you have known the glory of the great thrones

and sought your crowns with frankincense;

you have loved of beauty its stars

and wrapped yourselves in mantles of purple,

and you have played with fate and with crowns.

You tasted love in the theaters of its beauty,

amid the dancing of bodies and of strings,

and you violated even the sanctuary of its dream,

once you had had your fill of the lust for filth —

the lust of clay in the chambers of the slave-girls.

You stormed the kingdom of the dust with swords

and grew drunk on the wine of victory;

you drank the blood of mankind from skulls,

and you abridged the tablets of men's lives

with a pen whose ink is fire.

You tasted wine in all its differing cups

and spat upon the hand of the presser;

you left the people nothing but their graves,

and entrails parched with thirst before the vintner,

and the dregs of the wine for a few slave-girls.

You have known every place there is in glory,

and the utmost of its crimson pleasures;

you have known even the unseen — and yet

you never knew, in glory, the light of heaven:

the gift of the goddesses to poets.