"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.

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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