Talk of the Heart: Companion of the Morning

... As if you and the dawn kept a tryst with me, O bulbul! I outstrip you by a step, or you outstrip me by a step... and I steal out onto the balcony and rise up on the tips of my bare feet, straining my ear toward the returning rounds of your melody: in its plaintive release, in its questioning and its hopefulness — gazing at you: a coquettish fluttering, a swaying on the rims of the boughs, weaving with your neck the threads of the virgin rays, teasing with your downy beak the hidden feathers of two wings brushed with dew-moist color!... And O God, how my heart is wrung when you choke upon the melody and send it forth, an impassioned cry, with pain in it... and with joy in it! And the moment your throat breaks loose upon the open air, you are like the king upon his throne!

For whom is your song, O bulbul — for the dawn, or for me — your two only companions?!

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Send it forth, O bulbul — a limpid, rippling note, undulating with the violet veils of the dawn, with the whispers of the slumbering stillness, and pouring, all of it, into my heart!! For I need you, companion of the morning; I need your consoling note to quiet sensitive nerves shattered by the sleeplessness of nights!

Send it forth, O bulbul... sing to me, for our companion the dawn is heedless of you and of me, flooding the far worlds and the near with his white veil, to wash them all in his sea of light... And at every red twilight, the songs of the bulbuls and the goldfinches delight him in the thickets and by the pools... So sing, you, to me... to me alone... and wipe with your tender note the wounds of my heart...