At times, if not quite often,
what is old, nay, ancient,
is growing, moving slow.
So deep down—and high
its quiet well and roots do go.
So do ancient, timeless loves
and much knowing songs
and so does Damascus of Syria,
the oldest town on earth perhaps.
And if Hades has its Lethe,
Cocytus, Acheron, and Styx,
the River of Uninterrupted,
Undying Remembering,
would then have to flow
across the greatest Aeons
in this Well-Watered Land
of Damascus, the Mother
of All Cities of This World.
There in the sea of sands
and the scorching light,
homes tap souls’ refreshed,
bracing and cooling springs,
ever constant, ever nearby,
just as they do with wisdom
folded in the fan of silent shade.
And just as human dwellings show
what people think of Gods and souls
and beauty, either within or around,
then these Damascene houses note
that they are flowers made of stone
and temples where noise must cease
and yield a solemn hush with which
one can take and lift and live and taste
a thought turning into its avian verse
to grace and luminate one’s awed face.
There in the heart of such temple-homes
are atria bequeathed by the Romans,
the Persians, or the Phoenicians too—
to tell that the soul at its most divine
is always and always has been—inside
a site of profound peace and serene ease,
geometry and a garden of life that’s true
and intimate as only some legendary love
can be when two become for one another
already on earth a pair of justified well wings.
As in such a love so in such an ancient place,
the stem and spindle of the world itself give
them their spine, constancy, and consonance
and their sense and charm and continuation—
as there is the point where the eternal itself abides.
Thus Damascus’ tale is always timeless as it is
old and as old and timeless as it’s always fresh—
one of the oldest songs of the soul for us on earth,
teaching like its sacred atria that one is worth
what one has inside as much as to what she’s open to.
