The Earth Gods（大地之神）(4)

First God

I will not turn my eyes downward to the conceit of earth,

Nor to her children in their slow agony that you call love.

And what is love,

But the muffled drum and leads the long procession of sweet uncertainty

To another slow agony?

I will not look downward.

What is there to behold

Save a man and a woman in the forest that grew to trap them

That they might renounce self

And parent creatures for our unborn tomorrow?

Third God

Oh, the affliction of knowing,

The starless veil of prying and questioning

Which we have laid upon the world;

And the challenge to human forbearance!

We would lay under a stone a waxen shape

And say, It is a thing of clay,

And in clay let it find its end.

We would hold in our hands a white flame

And say in our heart,

It is a fragment of ourselves returning,

A breath of our breath that had escaped,

And now haunts our hands and lips for more fragrance.

Earth gods, my brothers,

High upon the mountain,

We are still earth-bound,

Through man desiring the golden hours of mans destiny.

Shall our wisdom ravish beauty from his eyes?

Shall our measures subdue his passion to stillness,

Or to our own passion?

What would your armies of reasoning

Where love encamps his host?

They who are conquered by love,

And upon whose bodies loves chariot ran

From sea to mountain

And again form mountain to the sea,

Stand even now in a shy half-embrace.

Petal unto petal they breathe the sacred perfume,

Soul to soul they find the soul of life,

And upon their eyelids lies a prayer

Unto you and unto me.

Love is a night bent down to a bower anointed,

A sky turned meadow, and all the stars to fireflies.

True it is, we are the beyond,

And we are the most high.

But love is beyond our questioning,

And love outsoars our song.

Second God

Seek you a distant orb,

And would not consider this star

Where your sinews are planted?

There is no centre in space

Save where self is wedded to self,

And beauty filling our hands to shame our lips.

The most distant is the most near.

And where beauty is, there are all things.

Oh, lofty dreaming brother,

Return to us from times dim borderland!

Unlace your feet from no-where and no-when,

And dwell with us in this security

Which your hand intertwined with ours

Has builded stone upon stone.

Cast off your mantle of brooding,

And comrade us, masters of the young earth green and warm.

First God

Eternal Altar! Wouldst thou indeed this night

A god for sacrifice?

Now then, I come, and coming I offer up

My passion and my pain.

Lo, there is the dancer, carved out of our ancient eagerness,

And the singer is crying mine own songs unto the wind.

And in that dancing and in that singing

A god is slain within me.

My god-heart within my human ribs

Shouts to my god-heart in mid-air.

The human pit that wearied me calls to divinity.

The beauty that we have sought from the beginning

Calls unto divinity.

I heed, and I have measured the call,

And now I yield.

Beauty is a path that leads to self self-slain.

Beat your strings

I will to walk the path.

It stretches ever to another dawn.

Third God

Love triumphs.

The white and green of love beside a lake,

And the proud majesty of love in tower or balcony;

Love in a garden or in the desert untrodden,

Love is our lord and master.

It is not a wanton decay of the flesh,

Nor the crumbling of desire

When desire and self are wrestling;

Nor is it flesh that takes arms against the spirit.

Love rebels not.

It only leaves the trodden way of ancient destinies for the sacred grove,

To sing and dance its secret to eternity.

Love is youth with chains broken,

Manhood made free from the sod,

And womanhood warmed by the flame

And shining with the light of heaven deeper than our heaven.

Love is a distant laughter in the spirit.

It is a wild assault that hushes you to your awakening.

It is a new dawn unto the earth,

A day not yet achieved in your eyes or mine,

But already achieved in its own greater heart.

Brothers, my brothers,

The bride comes from the heart of dawn,

And the bridegroom from the sunset.

There is a wedding in the valley.

A day too vast for recording.

Second God

Thus has it been since the first morn

Discharged the plains to hill and vale,

And thus shall it be to the last even-tide.

Our roots have brought forth the dancing branches in the valley,

And we are the flowering of the song-scent that rises to the heights.

Immortal and mortal, twin rivers calling to the sea.

There is no emptiness between call and call,

But only in the ear.

Time maketh our listening more certain,

And giveth it more desire.

Only doubt in mortal hushes the sound.

We have outsoared the doubt.

Man is a child of our younger heart.

Man is god in slow arising;

And betwixt his joy and his pain

Lies our sleeping, and the dreaming thereof.

First God

Let the singer cry, and let the dancer whirl her feet

And let me be content awhile.

Let my soul be serene this night.

Perchance I may drowse, and drowsing

Behold a brighter world

And creatures more starry supple to my mind.

Third God

Now I will rise and strip me of time and space,

And I wil dance in that field untrodden,

And the dancers feet will move with my feet;

And I will sing in that higher air,

And a human voice will throb within my voice.

We shall pass into the twilight;

Perchance to wake to the dawn of another world.

But love shall stay,

And his finger-marks shall not be erased.

The blessed forge burns,

The sparks rise, and each spark is a sun.

Better it is for us, and wiser,

To seek a shadowed nook and sleep in our earth divintiy,

And let love, human and frail, command the coming day.