Translated by A. Z. Foreman - The Mountain Poem: Words Spoken in Contemplation lyrics

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."