I’ve been making steady progress working on Ilahi Nama, and I thought it might be interesting to post some of what I’ve done so far. The latest poem of which I have finished the first draft, for example – just about all of the poems in Ilahi Nama are narrative – concerns a beautiful prince with whom an officer falls in love. Through a series of circumstances, the officer and the prince are taken captive by an enemy kingdom and put in the same cell, where they develop a relationship so intimate that, as the poem’s speaker puts it, “it’s not [the] storyteller’s place to reveal.” Eventually, the two kingdoms make peace, but one of the terms of that peace is that the prince should marry the daughter of his former captive, which he does.
Absorbed in the pomp and circumstance of his marriage, the prince puts the officer out of his mind for a time, but he eventually remembers his former cellmate and summons him for an audience. The officer, however, is overwhelmed by the prince’s majesty. He cannot imagine himself worthy of that splendor, and he dies. As he explains to the prince:
“In the prison cell we shared, my king,
I did not feel your majesty.
Today, after forty days and forty
nights of separation, I saw you
for the first time, and all around you
from east to west, swirled the uproar
and confusion of the royal court.
Before you parted from me, like that,
I was accustomed to you, like that
I was at peace; but this I can’t
endure. Wear that lovely garment
and I will love you once again;
but if these robes are yours; if this
splendor is where you will remain,
how will I find the strength to embrace
the truth of who you are?” He had
no more to say. Then, with a hundred
lamentations, his soul ascended,
pure, at his appointed time, to heaven.
The point of the story – though I am giving it here in a simplistic and reductive form – is that if you want to be worthy of enlightenment and union with God (which the prince’s majesty represents), you need to believe that you are worthy, which the officer clearly did not. What I most wanted to share with you, however, was my draft of the beginning of the poem, which describes the prince’s beauty. There are some rough spots still, but I thought people might find it intriguing, since the poem as a whole is clearly an example of a Sufi teaching poem which uses the occasion of a man falling in love with a man to explore what it means to achieve union with God:
A certain prince, a shimmering piece
of moon, once graced this earth. Jealous
of his beauty, the sun left its place
to wander the sky in rags. Face–
to-face with him, the sun shook
uncontrollably, like an epileptic
at the new moon. Inscribed on his forehead,
as in musk on silver, the letters jim
and mim, and when those letters twisted
and curled, he captured the kingdom of Jam.
With those eyebrows, he played the part
of the moon’s chamberlain. The heart
he hunted, and the liver, fell
prey to his eyelashes. A single
glance at the bay horse of his eyes
sent Temptation for its saddle—
the perfect rider for such a horse—
and what good game their hunt brought in!
His lips were honey and sugar,
but each lip was also sweeter
than either of those. When the bee
girded its loins to make the honey,
the sugar cane did the same for the sugar.
Two rows of thirty corals
shone between his carnelians like pearls.
From the seventh heaven, the stars gazed down,
and anyone who looked upon
his face, if he had a life,
would place that life before him, a sacrifice.
Love for this moon-like prince had turned
an officer’s heart upside down
and led his mind astray. A pain
without cure, and so without end,
filled him: his soul was not worthy
of his beloved. In agony,
he nonetheless suffered secretly,
and no one ever knew he bled
more under this grief’s tyranny
than any sufferer ever did.
[…] was kind of ridiculous. Attar, however, does believe in it. In my previous post, “An Officer Falls in Love with a Prince,” I gave you an example from Ilahi Nama of a man who falls in love with another man based on […]
[…] concept was kind of ridiculous. Attar, however, does believe in it. In my previous post, “An Officer Falls in Love with a Prince,” I gave you an example from Ilahi Nama of a man who falls in love with another man based on […]