Gibran Stories Omnibus

lotus land where days are born
     
To perilous isles where days are slain,
     
Man the faint hearted, overbold by our purpose,
     
Ventures with lyre and sword.
     
Ours is the will he heralds,
     
And ours the sovereignty he proclaims,
     
And his love trodden courses are rivers, to the sea of our desires.
     
We, upon the heights, in man's sleep dream our dreams.
     
We urge his days to part from the valley of twilights
     
And seek their fullness upon the hills.
     
Our hands direct the tempests that sweep the world
     
And summon man from sterile peace to fertile strife,
     
And on to triumph.
     
In our eyes is the vision that turns man's soul to flame,
     
And leads him to exalted loneliness and rebellious prophecy,
     
And on to crucifixion.
     
Man is born to bondage,
     
And in bondage is his honour and his reward.
     
In man we seek a mouthpiece,
     
And in his life our self fulfilment.
     
Whose heart shall echo our voice if the human heart is deafened
with
     
dust?
     
Who shall behold our shining if man's eye is blinded with night?
     
And what would you do with man, child of our earliest heart, our
own
     
self image?
     
     
      THIRD GOD
     
Brothers, my mighty brothers,
     
The dancer's feet are drunk with songs.
     
They set the air a-throbbing,
     
And like doves her hands fly upward.
     
     
      FIRST GOD
     
The lark calls to the lark,
     
But upward the eagle soars,
     
Nor tarries to hear the song.
     
You would teach me self love fulfilled in man's worship,
     
And content with man's servitude.
     
But my self love is limitless and without measure.
     
I would rise beyond my earthbound mortality
     
And throne me upon the heavens.
     
My arms wood girdle space and encompass the spheres.
     
I would take the starry way for a bow,
     
And the comets for arrows,
     
And with the infinite would I conquer the infinite.
     
But you would not do this, were it in your power.
     
For ever as man is to man,
     
So are gods to gods.
     
Nay, you would bring to my weary heart
     
Remembrance of cycles spent in mist,
     
When my soul sought itself among the mountains
     
And mine eyes pursued their own image in slumbering waters;
     
Though my yesterday died in child-birth
     
And only silence visits her womb,
     
And the wind strewn sand nestles at her breast.
     
Oh yesterday, dead yesterday,
     
Mother of my chained divinity,
     
What super-god caught you in your flight
     
And made you breed in the cage?
     
What giant sun warmed your bosom
     
To give me birth?
     
I bless you not, yet I would not curse you;
     
For even as you have burdened me with life
     
So I have burdened man
     
But less cruel have I been.
     
I, immortal, made man a passing shadow;
     
And you, dying, conceived me deathless.
     
Yesterday, dead yesterday,
     
Shall you return with distant tomorrow,
     
That I may bring you to judgment?
     
And will you wake with life's second dawn
     
That I may erase your earth-clinging memory from the earth?
     
Would that you might rise with all the dead of yore,
     
Till the land choke with its own bitter fruit,
     
And all the seas be stagnant with the slain,
     
And woe upon woe exhaust earth's vain fertility.
     
     
      THIRD GOD
     
Brother, my sacred brothers,
     
The girl has heard the song.
     
And now she seeks the singer.
     
Like a fawn in glad surprise
     
She leaps over rocks and streams
     
And turns her to every side.
     
Oh, the joy in mortal intent,
     
The eye of purpose half-born;
     
The smile on lips that quiver
     
With foretaste of promised delight!
     
What flower has fallen from heaven,
     
What flame has risen from hell.
     
That startled the heart of silence
     
To this breathless joy and fear?
     
What dream dreamt we upon the height,
     
What thought gave we to the wind
     
That woke the drowsing valley
     
And made watchful the night?
     
     
      SECOND GOD
     
The sacred loom is given you,
     
And the art to weave the fabric.
     
The loom and the art shall be yours for evermore,
     
And yours the dark thread and the light,
     
And yours the purple and the gold.
     
Yet you would grudge yourself a raiment.
     
Your hands have spun man's soul
     
From living air and fire,
     
Yet now you would break the thread,
     
And lend your versed fingers to an idle eternity.
     
     
      FIRST GOD
     
Nay, unto eternity unmoulded I would give my hands,
     
And to untrodden fields assign my feet.
     
What joy is there in songs oft