Gibran Stories Omnibus

brothers,
     
High upon the mountain,
     
We are still earth-bound,
     
Through man desiring the golden hours of man's destiny.
     
Shall our wisdom ravish beauty from his eyes?
     
Shall our measures subdue his passion to stillness,
     
Or to our own passion?
     
What would your armies of reasoning
     
Where love encamps his host?
     
They who are conquered by love,
     
And upon whose bodies love's chariot ran
     
From sea to mountain
     
And again form mountain to the sea,
     
Stand even now in a shy half-embrace.
     
Petal unto petal they breathe the sacred perfume,
     
Soul to soul they find the soul of life,
     
And upon their eyelids lies a prayer
     
Unto you and unto me.
     
Love is a night bent down to a bower anointed,
     
A sky turned meadow, and all the stars to fireflies.
     
True it is, we are the beyond,
     
And we are the most high.
     
But love is beyond our questioning,
     
And love outsoars our song.
     
     
      SECOND GOD
     
Seek you a distant orb,
     
And would not consider this star
     
Where your sinews are planted?
     
There is no centre in space
     
Save where self is wedded to self,
     
And beauty filling our hands to shame our lips.
     
The most distant is the most near.
     
And where beauty is, there are all things.
     
Oh, lofty dreaming brother,
     
Return to us from time's dim borderland!
     
Unlace your feet from no-where and no-when,
     
And dwell with us in this security
     
Which your hand intertwined with ours
     
Has builded stone upon stone.
     
Cast off your mantle of brooding,
     
And comrade us, masters of the young earth green and warm.
     
     
      FIRST GOD
     
Eternal Altar! Wouldst thou indeed this night
     
A god for sacrifice?
     
Now then, I come, and coming I offer up
     
My passion and my pain.
     
Lo, there is the dancer, carved out of our ancient eagerness,
     
And the singer is crying mine own songs unto the wind.
     
And in that dancing and in that singing
     
A god is slain within me.
     
My god-heart within my human ribs
     
Shouts to my god-heart in mid-air.
     
The human pit that wearied me calls to divinity.
     
The beauty that we have sought from the beginning
     
Calls unto divinity.
     
I heed, and I have measured the call,
     
And now I yield.
     
Beauty is a path that leads to self self-slain.
     
Beat your strings
     
I will to walk the path.
     
It stretches ever to another dawn.
     
     
      THIRD GOD
     
Love triumphs.
     
The white and green of love beside a lake,
     
And the proud majesty of love in tower or balcony;
     
Love in a garden or in the desert untrodden,
     
Love is our lord and master.
     
It is not a wanton decay of the flesh,
     
Nor the crumbling of desire
     
When desire and self are wrestling;
     
Nor is it flesh that takes arms against the spirit.
     
Love rebels not.
     
It only leaves the trodden way of ancient destinies for the sacred
     
grove,
     
To sing and dance its secret to eternity.
     
Love is youth with chains broken,
     
Manhood made free from the sod,
     
And womanhood warmed by the flame
     
And shining with the light of heaven deeper than our heaven.
     
Love is a distant laughter in the spirit.
     
It is a wild assault that hushes you to your awakening.
     
It is a new dawn unto the earth,
     
A day not yet achieved in your eyes or mine,
     
But already achieved in its own greater heart.
     
Brothers, my brothers,
     
The bride comes from the heart of dawn,
     
And the bridegroom from the sunset.
     
There is a wedding in the valley.
     
A day too vast for recording.
     
     
      SECOND GOD
     
Thus has it been since the first morn
     
Discharged the plains to hill and vale,
     
And thus shall it be to the last even-tide.
     
Our roots have brought forth the dancing branches in the valley,
     
And we are the flowering of the song-scent that rises to the
heights.
     
Immortal and mortal, twin rivers calling to the sea.
     
There is no emptiness between call and call,
     
But only in the ear.
     
Time maketh our listening more certain,
     
And giveth it more desire.
     
Only doubt in mortal hushes the sound.
     
We have outsoared the doubt.
     
Man is a child of our younger heart.
     
Man is god in slow arising;
     
And betwixt his joy and his pain
     
Lies our sleeping, and the dreaming thereof.
     
     
      FIRST GOD
     
Let the singer cry, and let the dancer whirl her feet
     
And let me be content awhile.
     
Let my soul be serene this night.
     
Perchance I may drowse,