Gibran Stories Omnibus

tentmaker sits darkly at his loom,
     
And the potter turns his wheel unaware;
     
But we, the sleepless and the knowing,
     
We are released from guessing and from chance.
     
We pause not nor do we wait for thought.
     
We are beyond all restless questioning.
     
Be content and let the dreaming go.
     
Like rivers let us flow to ocean
     
Unwounded by the edges of the rocks;
     
And when we reach her heart and are merged,
     
No more shall we wrangle and reason of tomorrow.
     
     
      FIRST GOD
     
Oh, this ache of ceaseless divining,
     
This vigil of guiding the day unto twilight,
     
And the night unto dawn;
     
This tide of ever remembering and forgetting;
     
This ever sowing destinies and reaping but hopes;
     
This changeless lifting of self from dust to mist,
     
Only to long for dust, and to fall down with longing unto dust,
     
And still with greater longing to seek the mist again.
     
And this timeless measuring of time.
     
Must my soul needs to be a sea whose currents forever confound one
     
another,
     
Or the sky where the warring winds turn hurricane?
     
Were I man, a blind fragment,
     
I could have met it with patience.
     
Or if I were the Supreme Godhead,
     
Who fills the emptiness of man and of gods,
     
I would be fulfilled.
     
But you and I are neither human,
     
Nor the Supreme above us.
     
We are but twilights ever rising and ever fading
     
Between horizon and horizon.
     
We are but gods holding a world and held by it,
     
Fates that sound the trumpets
     
Whilst the breath and the music come from beyond.
     
And I rebel.
     
I would exhaust myself to emptiness.
     
I would dissolve myself afar from your vision,
     
And from the memory of this silent youth, our younger brother,
     
Who sits beside us gazing into yonder valley,
     
And though his lips move, utters not a word.
     
     
      THIRD GOD
     
I speak, my unheeding brothers,
     
I do indeed speak,
     
But you hear only your own words.
     
I bid you see your glory and mine,
     
But you turn, and close your eyes,
     
And rock your thrones.
     
Ye sovereigns who would govern the above world and the world
beneath,
     
God self-bent, whose yesterday is ever jealous of your tomorrow,
     
Self-weary, who would unleash your temper with speech
     
And lash our orb with thunderings!
     
Your feud is but the sounding of an Ancient Lyre
     
Whose strings have been half forgotten by His fingers
     
Who has Orion for a harp and the Pleiades for cymbals.
     
Even now, while you are muttering and rumbling,
     
His harp rings, His cymbals clash,
     
And I beseech you hear his song.
     
Behold, man and woman,
     
Flame to flame,
     
In white ecstasy.
     
Roots that suck at the breast of purple earth,
     
Flame flowers at the breasts of the sky.
     
And we are the purple breast,
     
And we are the enduring sky.
     
Our soul, even the soul of life, your soul and mine,
     
Dwells this night in a throat enflamed,
     
And garments the body of a girl with beating waves.
     
Your sceptre cannot sway this destiny,
     
Your weariness is but ambition.
     
This and all is wiped away
     
In the passion of a man and a maid.
     
     
      SECOND GOD
     
Yea, what of this love of man and woman?
     
See how the east wind dances with her dancing feet,
     
And the west wind rises singing with his song.
     
Behold our sacred purpose now enthroned,
     
In the yielding of a spirit that sings to a body that dances.
     
     
      FIRST GOD
     
I will not turn my eyes downward to the conceit of earth,
     
Nor to her children in their slow agony that you call love.
     
And what is love,
     
But the muffled drum and leads the long procession of sweet
     
uncertainty
     
To another slow agony?
     
I will not look downward.
     
What is there to behold
     
Save a man and a woman in the forest that grew to trap them
     
That they might renounce self
     
And parent creatures for our unborn tomorrow?
     
     
      THIRD GOD
     
Oh, the affliction of knowing,
     
The starless veil of prying and questioning
     
Which we have laid upon the world;
     
And the challenge to human forbearance!
     
We would lay under a stone a waxen shape
     
And say, It is a thing of clay,
     
And in clay let it find its end.
     
We would hold in our hands a white flame
     
And say in our heart,
     
It is a fragment of ourselves returning,
     
A breath of our breath that had escaped,
     
And now haunts our hands and lips for more fragrance.
     
Earth gods, my