The Cypress of the Monastery (Verse)

Above the building of the “Monastery” at Petra — Wadi Musa — between the mighty mountain and the shoulder of the huge round dome that stands amid the Monastery's five domes, a small cypress tree has sprouted, alone among those towering crags, pouring out with its green the shadows of the spirit over that dismal stone.

The daughter of the wilds and the hillocks migrated,
she settled among the great summits;
atop the high dome with its lofty crest
she sat laughing among the breezes.
Her green dress clothes her body,
the raiment of the ages and the robe of the first rains;
between two clefts of a mountain is her rooting-place,
the crags around her in the bondage of servants.
The dome of the Monastery — and how mighty it is —
embraced her like a mother, so she was never orphaned;
she made of its head a couch for herself,
caring not whether time be fair or unjust.
Her head towers proud above the hills,
and in the heart of the rock are her stem and foot;
a temple in the high mountain is for her
a foothold, and the roof a throne and sanctuary.
The dome stands, with the domes around it
that have written the glory of nations,
as a giant stands in his stronghold,
hands raised in resolve and pride.
Beneath it, columns firmly planted,
towering in height, massive in masonry.

Their carving, like tattooing on the face of the smooth rock,
was carved by a hand of art and high endeavor;
and time overtook their maker —
it kept the tattoo and wore away the tattooer.

A temple whose worshipers decay has worn away;
it defies time and scorns antiquity.
Its door, its courts, its yards
were hewn in the high, proud mountain.
I wandered bewildered through its expanses
and climbed to the roof, walking as in a dream —
and there, a cypress, sprouting
alone among lifeless heaps of stone.
No companion, no comrade about her
but the crown of the tower and the deaf rock;
she sees neither visitor nor passerby,
only the beasts of the wild and the vulture birds.
The tourists stand baffled below her —
all but the one who sought the ascent, and resolved.

She stood bearing the secret of the soil,
revealed as a banner upon a peak:
a green hope in the solid rock,
and life between a tomb and an idol.

★

Temple of the Monastery — it is you who guard it,
daughter of the rain-cloud's water, green with grace;
from the eyes of time she has kept its beauty,
charmed it against extinction and nothingness.
I said: O daughter of the wilds and the hills,
how do you live — do you not complain of weariness?
She quivered with the quiver of a heart stirred
by the memory of the cradle's soil at the foot of the thicket,
and from the heart's anguish she wept a dew
that no scorching winds or embers have dried;
and she complained to me of a cruel solitude
among flinty ones stricken with deafness,
who do not feel what is in my breast
of longing for shared laments and melody.
The birds forsook me when they made
for the trees of the valley, toward more abundant good;
my peers in the soil of the homeland envied me
when they saw me a queen above the summits —
and I envy them, for it is they
who have lived in comfort beneath the mother's shade.
“I am envier and envied alike” —
so it is with whoever attains the utmost greatness.

Amman — Umm Khaldun