The town I loved

In long-gone days

What has become of it?

The paths I knew

Have vanished

And memory grew dark

Nothíng in you, my obscure town

Of childhood

Retains a trace of me

And the stranger is aware

Of every move of his limbs

And the lightness of the light

Loses its speed and gains weight

As every thought, every breath

Grows into a monument to itself

Darkness grazes

Barren pastures

And coldness

Bleeches out my heart

 

My mind, like a tree in the stream

Reaches out for the rhythms

The colour sounds

And shadow lights

Of dream time's daily revelations

When earth and sky were young

Listen and hear!

The childrens' voices

Like ships on the ocean

In tidal inflection

Flow

Into age after age

With the words that endure

From the dew of the dawn

To the mellow flame of the dusk

Read, heart

And recite!

For only thus can you remember

The future that was born

Before the past

And the pattern

Of the leave

That fell

Today

 

In the house of letters

In the house of voices

In the house of memorized perfection

Some of us listened without hearing

Some of us spoke without knowing

And some of us taught

Without

Understanding

What happens to the flower when it is dried?

What happens to the rose when it is plucked?

It became, in annihilation

A monument to itself

And like the stranger who is

Aware of the unconscious reflex

It becomes, in reflection

A witness

To the essence

Of its shape

Like an eye that

In blindness

Sees far beyond

Itself

 

Yet my impatient heart

In the instant it called its own

Overlooked

In life as well as

In life's memory

The depth that surfaced

On the ignorant's lips

And grew, thus

Ignorant

Poor, unsophisticated heart

In repetition you failed to discover

Transcendence

In revolution destiny

And in providence

Revolution

And in your fractured faith the leaf

That in the instance of its fall

Comprising itself and its cessation

In the paradoxon of cause and effect

Which mirrors Allah in being's double negation

Contains the universe