Or leaves are urine that’s grown cold and sallow
So that the garden’s face turns golden yellow—167
Cracked blisters on each branch’s bark abound
And leaves drift slowly to the golden ground.
Narcissi pack their clothes up now they’re leaving,
The box tree droops its head as if it’s grieving,
The jasmine tarnishes, each rose’s heart
Drops blood-red petals as it falls apart,
Vine tendrils dry into a twisted mass
As if Zahhak’s snakes writhed across the grass.168
When hostile winds blow, and the leaves are driven
Across the garden’s breadth, their fall’s forgiven—
They’re bales of cloth thrown overboard to save
A ship that’s threatened by a massive wave.
The grass grows dark with dust, bright flowers turn pale
And sickly-sallow in the dusty gale.
Quinces and grapes are picked, ripe apples greet
Red pomegranates when their branches meet—
The pomegranates split and drip bright red
As if their injured vital organs bled,
And red dates enviously eye the shade
That red pistachios’ opening shells have made,
While oranges and citron fruits compete
As to whose musky spheres are more complete.
The gardener’s drunk when he goes home, a sign
That he’s been tending vats of Magian wine—169
And gradually the weary garden shows
The wounds that it’s received from autumn’s blows.
*
As if she’d stepped down from a splendid throne,
Layli now grieved in darkness and alone,
Her springtime was laid waste, her torch’s light
Flickered and failed in autumn’s windy night,
The golden scarf she’d worn about her head
Became the shroud with which men clothe the dead.
She was a linen thread, who’d been a rose
Clothed in the loveliest of linen clothes,
The full moon was the new moon, hardly there,
The cypress like a mirage in the air.170
Grief and confusion filled her heart and head,
As one began, the other grew and spread;
Summer had dried the dew, now autumn squalls
Ensure each petal of each tulip falls.
The day Majnun had left, the cypress dried
And withered like a barren tree that’s died,
But all the love that she had felt before
Only increased a hundredfold and more;
Seeing Majnun held by a hundred chains,
A hundred agonies and burning pains,
She felt all that he felt . . . and ten times over
Now that she’d been abandoned by her lover.
As all this misery usurped her mind,
Moment by moment her frail health declined;
Fever sapped all her beauty, fever bit
Into her sweetest self and swallowed it.
The cypress lay alone and brokenhearted,
While from her boughs the pheasant had departed;171
As if she were a fallen seed, she lay
Quite still, and hid her wasted face away.
*
She called her mother to her, to confide
In her the secrets that she’d sought to hide.
She said: “How is it that a suckling doe
Drinks poison in her milk, and doesn’t know?
I lie here, waiting to depart; don’t speak
Too harshly to me, I’m worn out and weak.
This is not love but grief, this is not life
But agony and soul-destroying strife;
I’ve suffered secretly so much that I
Know that my heart is ready now to die.
If as my soul is leaving me, I say
Secrets that I’ve kept hidden till today,
If I draw back that final veil, you’ll know
I’m setting out for where I have to go.
Now place your hand upon my neck, and bless
My parting as I wish you happiness;
Know as my soul’s released that I depart
Because my friend and I’ve been forced apart.
Dress me in death: prepare me kohl from earth
He’s trodden on, for it’s of unmatched worth,
Mine all his woe, and sprinkle on my head
As rosewater the copious tears he’s shed,
And scatter fragrant camphor, with cold sighs,
Where that poor yellow flower,172 my body, lies;
See that my shroud is soaked in blood since I’ve
Died as a martyr while I was alive—
Adorn me as a bride, my veil will be
My grave’s earth as it’s scattered over me.
*
“And when my wanderer knows the details of
How I have wandered from this earth for love,
He’ll come, I know, to where my body lies
To greet me, and to mourn with tears and sighs.
He’ll sit beside my grave and, unresigned,
He’ll seek the moon but earth is all he’ll find;
Beside my earth that lonely earth will mourn,
Filled with regret now, wretched and forlorn,
My love, who is so strange, and who will be
A strange memento for your heart of me.
By God, I pray you, see you treat him kindly,
Don’t rush to blame him, don’t condemn him blindly—
There’s no one like him; seek him out, relate
My story to him, and my final fate.
I loved him well, I cherished him, may you
Like me, for my sake, love my lover too;
Tell him, ‘As Layli broke free from the chain
That tethers us to this brief world of pain,
Your love was all she thought of as she gave
Her soul to heaven, her body to the grave.
She said her love for you was pure and true,
Her soul sought love, and love was all she knew.
What should we say? Love for you filled her mind
As she set out, and left this world behind;
While she was in the world her thoughts were all
Of you, and you were all she could recall,
And as she died, it was those thoughts she bore
To be her heavenly food for evermore,
And even now, within the earth, she longs
To be with you again, where she belongs.
Like men who watch the road, she waits for when
She’ll see you as you come to her again,
She waits and turns and paces and looks back
To see you coming on that heavenly track.’
And tell him that I said with my last breath,
‘O you who are my soul and my soul’s death,
From now on look at no one else, unless
It’s with God’s unalloyed kindheartedness;
Look at how wrong you were to think of you,
Your self, so that this “you” was all you knew!
So that for all your shrewdness you became
Mad in yourself, your life, and in your name!’”
*
Tears wet her eyes now, and she turned her face
To start her journey to another place;173
She’d told the secrets that she’d tried to hide—
She’d sought her soul, and gave her soul, and died.
Her mother saw the bride depart, a
nd she
Knew Judgment Day then, and eternity.
She tore her head-scarf off, and let her hair,
As white as jasmine, stream out in the air;
Grieving, she held her child in her embrace
And wept above her lovely hair and face,
And in the agony of her despair
Defaced her own face and tore out her hair.
Age soaked youth’s pillow with her desperate cries,
Against her head she placed her weeping eyes,
So much she wept, her tears became a flood
(They were no longer tears but drops of blood),
So much she groaned that, hearing her, the sky
Groaned in response a thunderous reply.
Agates were formed with every blood-soaked tear
And starry pearls were formed when they were clear,
And as they fell they made a necklace for
The lovely moon that would arise no more,
Whose coffin was her mother’s aching heart,
The catafalque in which she would depart.
Then she arrayed her child as custom said
Was fitting for the burial of the dead,
Sprinkling her rose with fragrance redolent
Of ambergris and rosewater’s sweet scent;
She did not fear to place her in the ground
Knowing that only there can peace be found.
This princess was despoiled of all she had,
All that could worry her, or make her sad,
Her life was at an end now; on this date
The world had signed the firman of her fate.
Majnun Learns of Layli’s Death
This famous story’s earliest author’s pen
Recorded word by word what happened then:
*
When brokenhearted Zayd became aware
Layli had died, he gave way to despair—
How long he wept (and is there anyone
Who’s never had to mourn those dead and gone?);
He dressed in black, and like a man who’s bowed
Beneath oppression’s yoke he wailed aloud.
He visited her grave, and roared in pain,
Weeping like thunderous clouds of springtime rain—
Don’t ask me how he fared, as like a wave
Of suffering he broke upon her grave.
Men fled away from his heart-rending cries
And from the tears that flooded from his eyes;
He wept and wailed with such intensity
It seemed the world turned black in sympathy,
And burning still with grief he set out over
The barren waste to visit Layli’s lover.
He reached that lost soul as his torch’s light
Succumbed to darkness in the dead of night,
And sat down wearily beside his friend,
Weeping as though his tears would never end.
Sobs choked his voice, he looked down, and then tried
To speak again, and still he wept and sighed;
Majnun perceived how pallid and distraught
Zayd was, how tongue-tied and how overwrought,
And said, “My brother, tell me, why these sighs,
This smoke beneath which fire assuredly lies?
Why is your face in such a state? What’s made
You wear these clothes of such a dismal shade?”
He said: “Because Fate’s turned its back, because
Nothing is as we used to think it was:
Up from the earth itself black water pours
And death has broken through its iron doors,
On our enchanted garden hail storms rained
Till on our rosebush not a leaf remained;
The brightest moon has fallen from the sky,
The cypress fell, and lies where she must lie.
Layli has gone, she’s cast this world aside,
Grieving she lived for you, and grieving died.”
*
As though he saw an earthquake, or as though
His shoulder felt a sword’s decisive blow,
Majnun stood still, unmoving and in silence,
And then the thunderbolt’s tremendous violence
Hurled him against the ground as if it spurned him,
And as it threw him headlong, lightning burned him.
He lay a moment, turned his head aside,
And started up, and to the heavens cried,
“O faithless bringer of a bitter fate,
How clumsy are the outcomes you create!
A thunderbolt against a little plant?
Such anger hurled against a tiny ant?
When, with a little spark, the wretch expires,
Why should an ant deserve hell’s thousand fires!
Wine’s poured according to the goblet’s measure
And just proportions are what give us pleasure.
You’ve made me like a sputtering torch, a breath
Of wind’s sufficient to ensure my death;
Why did you strike me with your sword like that?
I’m not a dragon, I’m a tiny gnat!
This is how savage beasts act, beasts that roam
The empty wastelands and who have no home.”
*
His animals approached, and saw him tear
His clothes to tattered rags in his despair,
His flowing tears proclaimed his misery
While they shed tears of silent sympathy.
Zayd like his shadow followed him, and sought
To free him from the shadow that he’d brought,174
And thinking it might help him, and be just,
Proposed a pilgrimage to Layli’s dust.
Majnun said he’d be like a plant that dries
Within that dust and withers till it dies,
And asked Zayd how to reach the hallowed ground
Where Layli’s dusty graveside could be found,
Then ran from hill to hill, from plain to plain,
Weeping with inextinguishable pain,
And never rested but dashed on and on
Like a disheveled drunk whose reason’s gone,
Sadder than anything that could be said,
More shameless than whatever should be said,
His head and heart worn out with countless fears,
His hair torn out, his faced besmeared with tears,
Stumbling and reeling, but with wild persistence
Still going forward till, there in the distance,
He saw her grave, and at this longed-for sight
He fell, as shadows fall before the light.
*
He reached the grave, writhing as serpents do,
Or like a thorn-pierced worm that’s slashed in two,
And on the grave itself he was the snake
That writhed there for the hidden treasure’s sake.175
He wept such bloodshot tears it seemed as though
The grave became a spot where tulips grow,
His tears dripped like a candle’s wax, his cries
Were like its flickering flame that flares and dies.
“What can I do?” he cried. “My agony
Has made a melting candle out of me;
She was the one who held my heart, above
All kings and queens she was my sovereign love,
And now the wizened king that rules the world176
Has snatched her from me with this spear he’s hurled.
She was the rose I held, till winds made all
Her lovely petals loosen and then fall,
She was the cypress sapling
whom I chose
Till death brought all her growing to a close,
She was my springtime blossom—would that Fate
Had guarded her before it was too late!
I held fresh violets in my hand, so bright
And sweet they seemed to be my heart’s delight,
Injustice snatched them from my hand, and I
Grow ever weaker now and long to die;
I chose a rose-red wine, no other wine
In all the world could be compared to mine,
A thieving ruffian spilled the wine, and dashed
My glass against the roadside where it smashed.”
He paused, over the grave his head was bowed,
In agony he wept, and cried aloud:
“O new-blown rose that autumn’s winds have taken,
You never saw the world that you’ve forsaken,
O ruined garden, torn up root by root,
O fruit tree destined never to bear fruit,
How do you fare, my love, now you lie there
Coerced into this pit, how do you fare?
How is that musky mole? How are those eyes,
Wide as a doe’s are when she turns and flies?
How are your agate lips, how is your hair
Whose fragrance sweetened the surrounding air?
What colors paint your portrait now, what flame
Now melts the candle of your beauty’s fame?
What splendid sights are your sweet eyes now viewing,
What musk do you imagine that you’re strewing?
What stream does your tall cypress grow beside,
Safe in what gardens do you play and hide?
How do you fare, wounded within this grave,
How pass your time, within this cheerless cave?
Caves always harbor snakes, they’re not a place
For someone such as you to show her face;
I grieve you’re there, though I would willingly
Befriend you there and keep you company.
And you’re a treasure now you’re underground—
Where treasures are, a snake is always found,
And if a treasure’s in a cave, beside it
There’s sure to be a snake to guard and hide it;177
Now I’m that guardian snake, who from my nest
Of sorrow’s come here as a watchful guest
To be the sentinel that seeks to save
The treasure that lies hidden in your grave.
You lived like sand, whose grains disperse and spill,
Like water in a well now, you lie still;
You’re like the moon itself, and so I see
Why it’s not strange you’re far away from me.
Your face is hidden from me now, it’s true,
Layli and Majnun Page 23