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...
