Chant of the Stars

Your reason is the fruit of life, your love is creation’s mystery; O form of dust, welcome to this side of the world of dimensions!

Venus and Moon and Jupiter are rivals on your account, for one glance from you there’s a great jostle of manifestations.

On the road to the Beloved there are revelations ever fresh and new; the man of true yearning and desire yields not his heart to the All.

Life is truth and purity, life is quickening and surging; gallop from eternity to eternity; life is the Kingdom of God.

Unto the passion of minstrelsy give leave to clamour and riot, give wine again to profligate and censor, wine pitcher on pitcher.

Syria and Iraq, India and Persia are accustomed to the sugar cane; give to the sugar cane’s habituate the bitterness of desire!

That it may enter upon battle with the high billowed ocean give to the heart of the rivulet the joy of the swift torrent.

The poor man is a fire, rulership and power imperial are straw; a naked sword is ample enough for the august pomp of kings.

The drumming of the dervish, Alexander’s clamorous vanity— the one is the rapture of Moses, the other the Samiri’s conjuring.

The one slays with a glance, the other slays with an army; the one is all peace and amity, the other is all war and wrangling.

Both were conquerors of the world, both sought immortality, the one by the guidance of violence, the other guided by love.

Bring the hammer blow of the dervish, break the rampart of Alexander; renew the ancient wont of Moses, break the glamour of wizardry!