Number 19

A child practices teasing, aiming straight for my life; the cupbearer of our age keeps his wine still sour in the unripe grape. I bow to the playfulness of your beauty: in parting and in union your radiance never breaks away from my bewildered eyes. Though we swallow our own blood, we are safe from fate's wheel; our love has become both the disaster and the charm that turns it away. Better to make a happy home somewhere beyond the sky, for the flood of annihilation has surged into our hall. What would we do with our heavy hearts in this temple of being, if nonexistence had not been let into our foundation? Years have passed since we opened the vein of desire, and still the blood of rotten longings boils out of our arteries. We have put on the robe of our existence inside out: its outer face is our true meaning, its lining the mere title. We are the Joseph of Canaan in wisdom, and the wicked self is Zulaikha; the world is our pit, and the people of this age are our brothers. No one will get a turn to be questioned if our Judge settles our account on the Day of Resurrection. With all the shame our sins have brought upon us, our disobedience would not even regard the piety of the ascetic. Our covenant takes no crack from all this faithlessness; our pledge is made of the same clay as our faith. Strange that we still keep eyes hopeful toward love, and yet our raw, unfinished burning has not stained our faith with the color of unbelief. We are drowned in disobedience, and stranger still: out of grace our sovereign carries out that very command of ours. There is a dark line written on the scripture of the idols' faces, a verse foretelling our own dark fortune. Where are we, and where the luck to catch the prey of the heart's desire? To rival the heavens! How could that ever befit our station? How long, generous Lord, this cruelty and tyranny of separation? Tell our king it is better to be kind to his subjects.