Before The Gate Of The God Poem by Badr Shakir al-Sayyab

Cast out, the darkness, for asylum
O you who guide the ants in the sand
And hear the pebbles on the streambed
I cry out like thunder in a mountain cave
Like the sigh of the noonday heat
DO you hear my call? O blessed one, you hear
And, hearing do you answer?
O hunter of men
Wrecker of women, o torturer
Who efface your servants with cast stones and earthquakes
Who desolate homes
cast down before homes
cast down before your great gate
I feel thought collapse within me
Am I revolt? In anger?
Does the sinner rebal in your holy shrine?
I desire of life only that which I have:
Darkness crowds the length of grainfilled barn
While my harvest-field grows in the morning light
I have shaken its dust from my hands
what matter if tomorrow
There come sowers or reapers
Let the years scatter the tombs and ears of corn
I wish to live in peace:
Like a candle melting in the dark
with a tear to die, and a smile
I am weary of the blazing of noon
Of wrestling with its torrent and my mind
And the of my night with palm tree and lamp and thoughts
chasing rhymes
In the darkness of sea and desert
In the waste of doubt and lunacy
I am weary of my great struggle
Splitting my heart to feed the poor
Lighting their hovels with my eyes' candle
Clothing them in ancient banners
That exude the smell of defeat
I am weary of my last spring
I see it in the pollen, the marigold, the rose
I see it in every spring, traversing frontiers
I am weary Of life's deceit
I live on my yesterday and call it tomorrow
As If I were an actor in the world of doom
sought out in the darkness by the fates
The candles are lit on his great stage
He laughs at the dawn, and his heart is full of the
noontide blaze
I am weary as a child wearies of weeping
I want to sleep in your holy shrine
Beneath a blanket of sin and error
cradled in whores' convulsions
So your hands would disdain to touch me
I want to behold you.... yet who may see you?
In the procession of tormented sinners
Our broken voices crying
Our throats rending the air in lament:
Our wasted faces
As if scratched by children in the dust
Have known not beauty or charm
Childhood passed, the flash of youth died
And melted like a cloud
And still we wear our same faces
No exploder of beauty, to you
We wander, straying in the gardens of outward form
Alas
For a world that sees the waterlilies
And sees not the shell on the oceanbed
And the peerless pearl within the shell
prostrate and biting at I cry
'O god, I wish to Die'