A Song And The Sultan

It was no more than the description of a burst of rain and handkerchiefs of lightning which burned the secret of trees— then why did they resist her? When she said that something different from this water runs in the river and the people of the shore are statues and other things, why did they torture her? When she told them the forest was abounding with secrets and the moon was stabbed with a carving knife and the blood of the nightingale was on that stone, abandoned, why did they resist her? Why did they torture her? When she said, my country is a mountain of sweat and on the small bridge a man is dying and darkness burning the Sultan was angry and the Sultan is an imaginative creature. He said, 'The fault is in the mirror so let your singer be silent and let my kingdom from the Nile to the Euphrates be.' and he shouted, 'Put that poem in prison! ' The torture room, for security, is a thousand times better than an anthem or a newspaper. Go and tell the Sultan that the wind cannot be wounded by the shake of a sword that millions of trees can become green in the cupped hand of a single letter. But the Sultan was angry, and the Sultan is everywhere on stamps, in psalms, and on his forehead is the tattoo of hunting. He shouted, 'It is ordered! Execute this poem! ' Execution Square is the best anthology for obstinate sons. Go and tell the Sultan that lightning cannot be imprisoned in a corncob that songs are the logic of the sun and the history of sheaves and the nature of earthquakes. That songs like tree trunks may die in one land but sprout in every country The blue sun was an idea the Sultan tried to submerge but it became the birthday of an ember and the red sun has become an ember which the Sultan in vain imprisoned and suddenly the fire is a revolution! The voices of blood have taken the tone of a tempest and the pebbles of the Square are becoming like open wounds and I laugh, awed by the birth of the wind. When the Sultan resisted me I grasped the key of the morning and groped my way with the lamps of wounds. Oh how wise I was when I gave my heart to the call of the tempest! Let the tempest roar, O let the tempest roar...!