THE LAND OF PALESTINE
Within Caesarea’s proud castle tower
King Herod sat, his head in palms reclining.
The king, a weary wasted man whose life
By many ills was being undermined.
Westwardly racing, sped the crimson sunset
Into the waves that bear the blood red ring
To the tower’s base . . . . The King just turned his head,
For painful is this light to tired eyes,
And he gazes across the stretching Plain of Sharon.
His gaze first fell upon Gerizim’s summit,
And thence, like one infirm with age, it stole
Across Sebastia, to Bethel, and
Then further yet, to distant Antipatris.
A few steps more it dragged and then stood still
Steeped in the verdant sea. How near now seem
Its waves! The tops of palms and olives,
The crooked sycamores and tetrabinths with their naked
Bark-free bodies, the pastures’ buoyant grasses
All swelled and raised, all helter-skelter rushing
Toward the bluish mountain-tops that eastward rise.
Those golden islands bathing in this ocean,
Fields rich with crops, around them endless fences
Of mighty cactus, full of crimson blossoms
As if besmeared with blood just freshly shed.
And over all, a reddish light is playing
Like a bloody dust . . . . . .
The King closed his weary eyes.
And bloody rings begin to madly circle
Before his tightly closed and tired pupils.
Madly they dance while they upward slowly rise,
And others come, revolve and disappear,
The while the King would want to catch them all
To entertain his eyes with their lithe dancing.
From out the sea a wind blows o’er the plain,
The wind that breathes the plains’ perfumed breath,
The King dilates his wasted trembling nostrils,
To catch this scent . . . . The soul of grassy plains,
The lillies’ sighs, the scented breath of Roses . . .
Roses of Sharon, blessed by the priests
In sacred chants of Lord of Sabaoth,
Like love’s excitement is this breath of Roses,
Roses of Sharon, glorified in Cantos,
Sung in the evening by maidens around the fountain.
The sweetened odor sinks into his bosom
And wakes therein again an age-old pain;
His Miriam, this proud and dusky maid unconquered,
His Miriam, so mercilessly murdered,
His dream, his lonesome soul’s eternal grief,
For his Rose of Sharon yearns the grief-sick King.
This work is a translation and has a separate copyright status to the applicable copyright protections of the original content.
| Original: |
This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published before January 1, 1929. The longest-living author of this work died in 1942, so this work is in the public domain in countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 81 years or less. This work may be in the public domain in countries and areas with longer native copyright terms that apply the rule of the shorter term to foreign works.
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| Translation: |
This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was legally published within the United States (or the United Nations Headquarters in New York subject to Section 7 of the United States Headquarters Agreement) between 1929 and 1977 (inclusive) without a copyright notice. The longest-living author of this work died in 1987, so this work is in the public domain in countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 36 years or less. This work may be in the public domain in countries and areas with longer native copyright terms that apply the rule of the shorter term to foreign works.
Public domainPublic domainfalsefalse |
