Let my life and work vanish back into the Primal Night
From which the suns sprung — suns, molten blackness lit by love’s light.
I never signed on for this voyage, I was shanghaied.
When I awoke we were sailing out on the spring tide.
How rich are love’s scents tonight and how sweet is love’s endless tale!
Each dust-grain is a rose, and each rose is its own nightingale.
The dust-garden of roses and nightingales blooms and sings all around me.
Wisdom I hold cheap after having heard so much nonsense uttered profoundly.
The dust blooms and sings; but I am still dumb, apart, bound in stone-binding.
But the Master has kept His shining word and has begun the grinding.
Not among stones with the noise of false waters in my ears
Did I reckon would be the harvest of my ardent years.
All those girls who have beguiled me through the ages:
They have been scrupulously excluded from history’s pages.
Our song is no more, Beloved, than the sighing of a breeze in your praise;
We do not implore great boons or small benefits to fatten our days.
Though we were to sing from now until time’s end, we will be no more
Than a band of minstrels playing a one-night stand before Your door.