Poetry

Poetry

By Ameen Rihani.

Table of Contents

1. Titlepage
2. Imprint
3. Dedication
4. Salaam
5. Poetry
   1. Ever to Be
   2. Upon the Peak of Sanneen
   3. The Philistine
   4. My Burnoose
   5. A Spring Dirge
   6. Fardi wa Nafli
   7. Adele
   8. Nectar and Blood
   9. Resurrection
   10. Disarmed Desire
   11. A Better Woe
   12. The First and Last
   13. In the Meadow
   14. O, Sweet Sometime
   15. A Bed of Flame
   16. The Sister of Death
   17. Retribution
   18. Let Thine Eyes Whisper
   19. Lilatu Laili
   20. Midnight Mood
   21. Thy Smile
   22. Unadorned
   23. Dissolution
   24. A Serenade
   25. The Brass Bed
   26. Three Golden Threads
   27. Independent Blossoms
   28. The God of My Goddess
   29. A Peasant’s Song
   30. Her First Sorrow
   31. A Nocturn
   32. Saada
   33. Stolen Salvias
   34. Jealousy
   35. Beneath the Salvias
   36. Gone with the Swallows
   37. To the Sonnet
   38. The Tomb and the Rose
   39. Rest
   40. The “Flatiron” and the Ruins of Palmyra
   41. It Was All for Him
   42. Repentance
   43. O, Give Me Strength to Take
   44. Near the Cascades
   45. Onward Keep
   46. Allah wa Ana
   47. In Memory of E. M. El-K.
   48. To Abu’l-Ala
   49. The Towers and the Night
   50. The End and the Beginning
   51. The Cataclysm
   52. Reflections
   53. The Song of Siva
   54. The Fruits of Death
   55. Constantinople
   56. Andalusia
       1. I: Alcazar
       2. II: Alhambra
       3. III: The Mosque
       4. IV: Al-Zahra
   57. In the Palm Groves of Memphis
   58. Prayer in the Desert
   59. Water and Flowers
   60. The Song of Rain
   61. The House of Night
   62. After Reading King Lear
   63. The Wanderer
   64. Lebanus
   65. The Pagan
   66. The Lost Disciple
   67. From the Arabic
   68. She Went Out Singing
   69. Hanem
   70. O Freedom
   71. The Road of Make-Believe
   72. Renunciation
   73. A Sufi Song
   74. The Two Brothers
   75. God of the Distances, Hear Us
   76. Badruddin
   77. The Sufi
   78. The Fugitive
   79. A Chant of Mystics
6. Endnotes
7. Colophon
8. Uncopyright

Imprint

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To my sisters
Saada and Adele

---

To my brother
Joseph

Salaam

From Syria to America

Pardon, dear reader.

The stranger at thy gate, hailing from the Orient, holds out to thee a gaunt and tattooed hand. This hand has often made mud-pies from earth that might have once mapped out the stars; or, in a drunken vision, heard the grumblings of a god and made of them a captivating creed: the brain of an ancient Assyrian astronomer; the spine of a Semitic sage; the cheeks of a Jezebel or a St. Takla; the heart of a slave that added beauty and horror to the chariot of a Babylonian king or a Roman conqueror:⁠—any or all of these might have besmeared this hand.

Wilt thou take it? The hand of a personified illusion, of an exiled dream, of an Oriental who makes himself thy guest.

He comes not to preach Buddhism to thee; nor Mohammedanism; nor Babyism; nor any other ism made picturesque and alluring by red caftans, white turbans, blue sashes and ambergris-scented lies.

The only message he brings from his vine-crowned and pine-girdled Mother to bewitching and enriching America is that of love and longing and lacrimal. He came from the Mountains of Lebanon, from under the shadow of the Acropolis of Baalbak, to learn from the Yankees the way to do things⁠—the way to rise and flourish and expand; or, as they put it, the way to get there and be it⁠—from a mundane point of view, of course. It has been observed, however, that the spots of a leopard are irremovable; and so is the lethargy of an Oriental. The writer has found the strenuous life to be as depressing and dwarfing as prison life itself; and so he has fallen back to the habit of dreaming, and singing, and taking things easy, even in restless and dreamless America. This sounds paradoxical; it is like going from the country of Trusts and Equality to establish a trolley-car system in the Lebanons. Even this might be possible fifty years hence, despite the opposition of those ancient hills. The writer has forsaken their cedars and pines, their vineyards and fig groves to walk in the shadows of skyscrapers and watch the sun rise languidly from behind a mound of bricks or a smoking chimney, and sink a-blushing behind the grimy walls of gaseous Communipaw.

“So fair a sun
Setting over so foul a town!”

one would exclaim; but nature delights in paradoxes, and freaks, and rococo. These songs, dear reader, might not even deserve to be classified with like phenomena; but, as the sincere expression of a soul just emerging from the abyss, they deserve to stand. If, however, thou thinkest them no worse in spirit and merit than the amyelencephalic discourses of a pundit, or the emetic dissertations of a Zamackshary, then remember as thou settest the book aside that the author does not appeal to your charity, nor to your justice. Thou art the host, gentle reader; and he relies on the hospitality and cordiality due a guest.

Poetry

Ever to Be

My far