Ashtarut

O rocks of stupor along the River Ibrahim, forgive a voiceless tear

You are a fragment of love-legends that endure from the intoxication of the ancients,
their heavy wounds brimming with a space dyed with the torn bodies of brides.
You would think the ancient one there had wearied of brooding, and bent, sobbing, before the face of fate,
mourning glory — the shade of land and sea, the soaring of the domes, filling the air —
mourning the contented banner that once shook with pride in the heart of horizon and skies.
It rent the morning, rent the sun with a sigh, and its echoes came back in blood;
and lo, love is the wound of the drooping wing, so morning sang the song of evening.

Ashtarut came gliding along the river's bank, loosing a morning over the whole expanse,
and the water grew drunk on fragrance, soft as a breeze, and the great trees twisted, bowed in reverence.
The waves danced chanting, the meadow sang out freely, and both clapped for the meeting.
O what an ancient god has Lebanon — a lover, waiting for the nymphs of the water!
Drunkenness swayed his shoulders, and he swaggered on the heights, his pride cast down;
and well might he have bowed before her feet, as domes bow beneath the summits.
Ashtarut, bride of the first desire, reared in the imagination of the poets,
swaying like the wave, swaying like laughing melody, song twining her sides,
spreads coquetry along the bank, and the forest is a piece of light,
and a spring flows unbroken from her hands, fragrant with shadows and dews.
If she sways with her hair, shadows of a moonlit night fall upon the waters.
What ails her, lost in musing, pouring her gaze far over the distant vastness,
pressing her breast — two carvings of hard stone, the color of fragrance and temptation —
while solace sings to her, saying: "Tomorrow, O ransom of the people of heaven —
I love, beneath them, a mortal, one who knows, beyond immortality, the depth of perishing!"
And her waiting was brief — for the flood of the forest lay in a golden smile of hers.

And Adonis, desire of the nymphs in the river, their chanting amid the storms,
had two nights since forsaken a bed of flowers plucked by the radiant hand —
forsaken Ashtarut, and the green pleasure in a crimson embrace of hers.
And she felt him a thought, and felt her love to be other than embrace and ascent;
she felt him a stab whose wound is sweet, binding man to the heights.

Goddess of beauty, goddess of wisdom today — and Lebanon a firebrand of guidance —
she breathes laws upon mankind, streaming with gentleness, streaming with light and bounty;
she scatters thought as stars stolen from the sobs of lovers and the wretched;
her messengers are the nymphs, spreading principles in anthems of deathless utterance;
her conquest leaps high-breasted, in the name of love in the two horizons, and the name of splendor,
bearing resolve from the shores of Phoenicia, and from her cedars the majesty of endurance.

Boat after boat plows the sea, strewing the distance over the deep,
carrying the lights from the east of the earth to every barren continent,
until every handful of Lebanon's soil is a mountain upon the far-off seas.

The cedars clapped, robed in glory, while Ashtarut hid herself away in secret.
What mourning is hers, what phantoms bare themselves in her wide dark eyes!
She sings of yesterday, of blossom-kisses amid the singing groves,
of Adonis, who set the river dancing with pride, its banks watered with bliss:
a countenance out of Lebanon's mountains in the morning, and a body of their unhearing stone,
the twist of his forearm a strip of sternness drowned in fresh lilies,
and the dawning of his brow, out of the anguish of secrets, come back robed in forenoon light.
He prophesies, and the rose's cheek is at play, and the storming winds hushed in listening —
a bareness that let fall proud features, the sun's rising out of clouds of dust,
a sheepskin and a quiver from which the red tremor of desire bares itself,
and the curves of a bow twisted about the forearm, come back dyed with doom.
She remembered him saying: "O my virgin garden, O my rapture among boon companions,
dawn laughs in your brow, and the plaint in your eyebrows tells of proud grace,
and night holds — with the rays in your lashes — the chill of languishing and the chill of sickness.
Are they languor and melted sorrows, or longing and the echo of weeping?
Desires pass through the air of your eyes as camel-drivers pass in the darkness,
preludes that brought forth Qays and Layla while the two were still the desert's desire.
What is in your cheeks of glimpses of paradises hidden from all but the eyes of prophets?
And your dark lip parts upon a small dream brimming over with luster?
I love you — amid the pine and the cypress — a vision in a green cloud."

She remembered him — the night sultry — drawing near, offering a forearm streaming with bounty,
and he twined his dew-cooled waist about her: the clasp of a rose in a golden hand,
and she melted between two arms — of Lebanon's rock, of the dew of the shades.
She remembered him, in his arms flowers he gathered for a pillow against evening;
and when she slept at nightfall, it was amid the flowers of the hills and the stars of the sky.
She remembered him — the tears filling her hands — in the mouth of the wild beast, red with blood,
dyed with blood, dyed with night: did he die, then, when the light died?
And he watered the river with gore, and the river became a memory of desire and a memory of misery.

Ashtarut despaired after Adonis, and made an end of the proud leap,
of the fresh young hopes, of glory wide enough to slay the sea before the trunk of the standard.
And when she passes, a curtain of darkness falls over Phoenicia — a curtain of ending.

O rocks of stupor along the River Ibrahim, forgive a voiceless tear.