What throttled at my saddle? Was I riding
a camel's body or a blast of wind?
No sooner had I set out from the early east
than I had westered out past twilight's end,
Alone, as dunes delivering me to dunes
moved me from rainless waste to rainless waste.
And I saw through the dark like a fell veil
falling across the faces of the Fates.
My home was nowhere other than the saddle,
my refuge was none other than the sword,
My friendship came from faces of desires
laughing with wishes for lips, without a word.
Under a night that, when I thought it over,
proved false my hope of dawn, I quickened my pace
Trailing a black cloak of the dark behind me
reaching for hope's white bosom to embrace.
I ripped the night's shirt open and beheld
a dawn-grey wolf there, sneering through the air.
Dark shards of sunrise glinted in its mouth.
A peering star blazed in its piercing stare.
I saw a mountain too, its haughty peak
and bunched spine vying with the worlds on high,
Deflecting every salvo of the wind,
and shouldering the starlight from the sky,
Brooding above the dunes like some great thinker
considering days to come as nights go by
With black clouds wrapped about it for a turban
and bangs of redhead lightning in its face.
And through the night, that tongueless mountain uttered
marvelous things:
How much more time in space?
How long have I been the a**a**in's safehouse
And sheltered hermits from the human race?
How many rovers have but pa**ed me by,
or bid their camels slumber in my shade?
How many times have whirlwinds smacked my body
while I stood ground against the sea's green blade?
Doom reached and took them all. Its ruinous wind
ripped each of them from time. As times go by
My throbbing thickets are a gasping chest,
and my doves' cooing is a mourner's cry.
No solace of forgetting stopped my tears.
I've wept them out on a life bereaved of friends.
How long shall I remain while riders go,
bidding farewell as one more friendship ends?
How long shall I be shepherd to the stars
with lidless eyes that cannot help but see
Them rise and set and rise as nights burst past
right to the last night of eternity?
So, Lord, have mercy on Thy desperate servant.
Lifting a hand of stone, Thy mountain kneels.
And I heard every lesson in its sermon
translated by the tongue of its ordeals.
That grueling night made it the greatest friend
Whose grief consoled, whose solace grieved till dawn.
And so I said, as I turned toward journey's end,
"Farewell, for some must stay and some go on."