The Nativity / Muhammad

...The star in the East will not set... as though it had been nailed fast, above the hill in Galilee, over the grotto...

...O what a night that was!!... and the sky in it was roads upon roads: on every road a color, and on every road a perfume...

...O the sky!! It comes down in majesty and reverence, to embrace the earth in her first joy!...

That is a night in which the star will not leave the hills of Galilee, until the light rises and the Child is born...

So peal, O bells of the Nativity!!

Peal in every dome of the domes of the churches, and carry in your echoes the echoes of the far-off generations, from the night of Galilee, the night the star was nailed fast, above the hill... over the grotto...

And tonight the sky lays her firstborn son in the arms of a woman of the people, in a grotto among the mountains of my country...

...Said a grain of sand to a grain of sand: It is as though I have drunk my fill, O neighbor!!
No longer do I feel the burning of the eternal thirst in the dryness of my heart.
And here upon this desert I am like the shimmer of water in the springs of Paradise!
And this desert, it seems, is no longer mirage and sands, nor abjection and begging!

Sister, the sky is stirring within me, and after this long age the earth can no longer contain me.
And a dry stone said to a stone like itself, in the open courts of the Kaaba: My ribs seem to be splitting, and a quaking all but wrenches me out of this ground.

I hold myself fast to myself, but I am coming loose, as though I were crumbling, grain by grain, into the dust!
And Abd al-Muttalib bound me yesterday with iron...
Why then have my ribs gone soft within the iron?!

And the light rises over the plain of Mecca — and behold, every grain of sand is a violet, and the stones of the Kaaba are crumbled dust.

...And in the desert, a mighty prophet...