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From “The Near East”
MEN there are who live among flowers | |
| And the colors of the rose are known to them in the seed— | |
| Even as the hands of a woman in the dark | |
| Make of the shadows a garden, | |
| Filling the night of her husband with fragrance. | 5 |
| Men there are who know the stars: | |
| To them, the night sky is a velvet woof | |
| Crossed with the tints of jewels and April waters. | |
| It is a carpet infinitely patterned, | |
| Whereon the Poet-God lies, half dreaming— | 10 |
| Amid the perfect and the boundless | |
| Yearning for the wistfulness of things imperfect, | |
| And so making the Song that is Humanity. | |
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| Even so am I to the roseate carpets of the Orient. | |
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| The Magic of Khorassan weavers is known to me: | 15 |
| The dyers of Khiva and Damascus, | |
| And the Arabian dreamers in purple, | |
| The resonant color-singers of old Turkestan, | |
| Have come to me out of the dim shadows | |
| Of the carpet-bales, | 20 |
| Under the flickering gas-jets, | |
| In the back room of a little shop on upper Broadway. | |
| For—how long ago!—in the time of peace | |
| I was a rug vendor. | |
| Nineteen Hundred and Sixteen, Anno Domini: | 25 |
| And Spring bursting with young green in the parks, | |
| And bird-wings rhythmically weaving | |
| Into the New Earth’s carpet | |
| Little mottoes of freedom! | |
| Gajor wept and said, “You will never return.” | 30 |
| And my friends in the Syrian café on Tenth Avenue | |
| Laid their hands heavily upon me. | |
| But I saw only the hands of the ancient color-singers beckoning; | |
| Heavier were their ghostly fingers tapping at my soul. | |
| Oh! never were the lips of her I love | 35 |
| More desirous and more dear | |
| Than when she alone whispered: | |
| “If thou diest, I die; yet go!” | |
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| Makhir Subatu! | |
| Nineteen Hundred and Sixteen, the Year of Our Lord, | 40 |
| And Spring; and the Rose of Sharon blooming | |
| By crimson-clotted brooks: | |
| And gold-tongued lilies | |
| That once, with my youth, answered the nightingale, | |
| Now dumb beneath the moon, | 45 |
| Their white throats choked with blood! | |
| Among the trampled green of olive-groves | |
| Are strewn the stained girdles of young women, | |
| Or wrapped about small—pitifully small—black mounds of death. | |
| Sky-blue, sea-blue, girdles of young women | 50 |
| That once sacredly bound the Hope of a Race, | |
| Waiting the loosening hands of Love; | |
| And little tunics of slain children | |
| Woven through the woof, like the snow-flower pattern, | |
| Under triumphant spring-green banners | 55 |
| Blowing from the four corners of the hills. | |
| And the fringes that hold the Sacred Carpet up to Heaven— | |
| The countless thick-packed white fringes— | |
| They are the bones of men who loved their Christ. | |
| For this is the great Prayer-rug of Islam. | 60 |
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| I have seen the Turk weaving his Sacred Carpet, | |
| I have knelt on the Prayer-rug of Islam! | |
| I am apostate, dear Christ! | |
| Christian and poet no longer, lover no more, | |
| How shall I lay hands on my beloved’s blue girdle? | 65 |
| My heart is a place of swords! | |
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