To her beside whose love every love fades away!
To her before whose sacrifices every sacrifice hides in shame!
To her for whose sake the wellsprings of existence were hallowed!
To her whom God willed to be the source of life in His creation,
after His own creating sources!
I offer this feeling of mine:
To my mother!.. and to yours!
The field of the universe knew motherhood when Eve cradled it in her firstborn,
and tenderness awoke, rising high over the earth, while fathers stood guard over its cradle.
And behold, love was a flame by whose radiance things and living beings ascended.
She entrusted to the world of dust a life the Gemini had kindled for her upon visions,
and the "apple of awareness" turned to a good, from which guidance shone upon the conscience.
Eve ate it without shame, and then a bashfulness born of its revelation came over her.
She lost the first bloom of bliss — and yet from her, bliss was strewn over misery.
O for Eden, a paradise of fancy whose beauty the prophets portrayed!
How it misted over, then vanished, to appear again as a mother's embrace where misery melts away.
It is an embrace bearing the message of eternity; from its letters a radiance shone forth.
It is a secret by which creation lives, in a cradle over which eyelids keep guard.
It is a riddle wrapped in tender folds; how many a maiden has swayed within its dream.
In the expanses of existence I hear a name before whose throne all names bow low.
It is "my mother" — and has my mother any peer, when giving grows earnest and sacrifice grows dear?
The rose-bowers swayed, scattering a spirit of perfume breathing faithfulness,
and joy blossomed over the earth like a wedding, glittering upon a sky of serenity.
The nightingales of the thicket sang in rapture when a hint of its whisper reached them,
and the garden breezes vied with one another, drunken, while the dews passed round their cups.
And behold, the universe, in a mother's keeping, is a festival, an embrace, and a call.
She bared her breast — wellsprings for a child made drunk by the echoes of her heart.
Her ribs sheltered him: a rampart whose battle the tempests have learned to shun.
Then she returned to the struggle in bereavement, crowned with her laurel by the martyrs.
She wipes the wound with tears, to hide the anguish of loss and of giving — out of pride.
O you who promise mankind an age made to burst forth by love and tenderness at evening,
in which souls keep faith with one another, moving on in a concord whose building is hearts:
every edifice of tottering pillar crashes down when decay takes hold of it —
except the edifice whose pillar is motherhood: it is a world from which heaven looks out.
The ground where a mother treads is a paradise whose fragrance and beauty the poets have long sung,
and upon her frail forearm has risen all that kings and the mighty ever built.
Her feast is the clear sky amid the storms of an earth that rancor has shaken in its gales.
