The Red Nightingales

"To the exiles among the sons of Lebanon, to those wanderers over the earth, beyond the seven seas.
To these the red nightingales say: Return, O strangers, to the abandoned houses, to the fallow land, to the light and the joy and the sun in your own country."

... And what else, O nightingale?
What? Of my white village, drowning in light?
.. Is there in your red beak a grain of its soil? One grain, O nightingale—cast it on my window!
And is there in it a green leaf from its oaks?
And did you roll your wings in the sweet scents of its roses and its narcissus?
And your throat? Is there in it, O nightingale, any of the songs of our girls?
How is the narcissus wood?
Is she still in it, the one in the pink dress—is she still there?
What, O nightingale, of my village?
And the nightingale on the window of my room fluttered its eyes, on the point of weeping...
Its wings were wet with the drifting snows.
In the storm, it came to me from the mountain!
I knew it by its red beak.
This is one of the nightingales of my village;
in my village live the nightingales with the red beaks.

*

And O nightingale...
I have asked you, O golden throat, by the song that is in it—
in the name of the green and the red, and the thousand colors upon colors,
by the red anemones that tilt their petals at the touch of the dew!
And the narcissus of the wood where once you found me, I and the one in the pink dress...
And that jasmine over the gate of her house... that green tent of white jasmine.
O red beak... tell me of my village...
Of those slopes!!
Have the wild roses sprung up in them?
And has the cyclamen come up among the rocks?

And have the leaves of the great oak turned green, in our vineyard, on the road...
... And the beloved's house—have its closed windows been opened, their shutters thrown wide into the light?
Of the stars... and the moon... and the paths of the moon and the stars there...
And the nightingale's eyes fluttered, a fluttering full of pain.
As if its heart brimmed over from its eyes, and it slipped from the branch of the tree to the iron of the window...
And it folded its wings over its beak.
And I heard it whispering the song of 'The Extinguished Mirrors,'
singing it at the window of my room...
It was like the light in which the last flame sinks down...
And like threads of the moon in the mist of the clouds,
and the panting of the perfume in the rose before it dies.
And it was like a funeral at a wedding:
I heard the nightingale whisper:
'... In spring... when the lilies come up on the hill,
and the sweet scents spread through the soil,
... in spring... when love returns to the narcissus wood...
tomorrow... the red nightingales in your village will have departed for far, far places...
Not one nightingale will remain in those mountains that knows how to sing...
For whom should the nightingales sing in your village, when there is no longer in your village a branch for the nightingales to light on?
And there is no longer in it a girl's waist heaping the blossoms or heaped over with blossoms.
And you no longer have a nose that savors sweet scent,
nor a hand that knows how to pick...
nor, any longer, a mouth to taste the good morsel in the mouth.
And in your village there is no longer the buttonhole of a white shirt that knows how to pin the red rosebud,
nor a white neck on whose whiteness a necklace of jasmine swoons and dies...
For whom should the nightingales sing in your village, when along its paths no figure sways, and no eye aches for a beloved..

For whom should the nightingales sing in those mountains?
There is no longer in them a lad whose throat pours itself out in a stretch of song...
Your shepherds... those wild throats have no echoes left in those valleys?
That tent of jasmine is drying up, desolate and dry.
And the beds of damask roses there have shed themselves on the soil..
And the windows of their western house are still shut, since its people went away with the sea...
And the night among you is heavy.. the stars rise, and the moon rises,
but neither the stars, in the evening gatherings, nor the moon.
And tomorrow, another caravan of your young men and your girls will take ship..
and the windows of another house in your village will shut forever..
and the nights will remain, alone, desolate.
And your old women will remain, their eyes trailing out over the sea... their hands touching the abandoned beds..
Some of you are beyond the seven seas, behind the spell-guarded palaces..
and some of you are here, eyes fixed always on the sea,
and some of you are in the blind city, which neither hears nor sees, crawling after the whorish piaster and the black loaf.
And what have you in the land of exile, O strangers, but the anguish of exile and its bitterness..
and after it, a span of earth you buy with money—a strange grave for a strange man.
And you ask me! What is in your village.
And you ask me, what of the villages of Lebanon, those precious emeralds hung in the heights..
And what, but ruin!
And what of a country in which nothing will remain but heaps of broken old men?
If the abandoned houses could speak, they would say:
Why did you build me for ruin?
And if the fallow land could speak, it would say:
Why did you leave me to dryness?
And if the graves could speak, the graves would cry out:
Return, O strangers, to my soil.. for your bones will find no rest in a foreign earth!'

*

And it was as if I heard, in the nightingale's hoarse voice, the sobs of the mothers of my village in the hours of farewell..
And as if I saw the waving of the white handkerchiefs...
And as if I...
— Then, O nightingale, the nightingales will not cry out at the sun's rising from behind our high mountains?
And joy will not spread through our village.
And where will the red nightingales cry, O nightingale?
And the nightingale stretched out its red beak,
and whispered...
Your village on the white hill is a mirror going dark...
And for whom should the nightingales sing in the villages whose lights have gone out??

March 4, 1950