The Storm by Kahlil Gibran

Author:Kahlil Gibran
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: White Cloud Press
Published: 2011-03-14T00:00:00+00:00

I stood by those three graves like a speechless eulogist, struck dumb by grief, flowing tears giving voice to emotions. I tried to think and reflect, but my soul disobeyed me, for the soul is like a flower that gathers its petals to itself when darkness comes, not giving its breaths to the phantoms of the night.

As I stood there, a cry of oppression poured forth from the grains of earth of those graves like fog pouring from the mouths of valleys. It vibrated in my ears and inspired my words.

I stood silent. If men could understand what the silence says, they would be nearer to the gods and farther from the rapacious beasts of the forest.

I stood sighing. Had the flames of my sighs touched them, the trees of that field would have lurched, left their places, and marched in battalions to fight with their branches against the Emir and his armies, their trunks toppling the walls of the monastery upon the heads of the monks.

I stood staring, stares in which the sweetness of pity and the bitterness of grief poured out over those new graves. The grave of a youth who paid with his life defending the honor of a weak and chaste girl and who rescued her from the claws of a ravening wolf. They cut off his head to repay him for his courage. The girl had sheathed his sword in the dust of his grave that it might remain as a sign speaking plainly beneath the Sun of the fate of manliness in a land where injustice and ignorance rule.

The grave of a girl. Love touched her soul, but her body was subject to the desires of others. She was stoned because her heart insisted on being faithful until death. Her beloved fashioned a bouquet of wildflowers to lay above her lifeless body. As they wilt and fade, they will tell of souls purified by love and their fate at the hands of a people ruled by matter and struck dumb by ignorance.

The grave of a poor and unfortunate man, his arms made weak by toil in the monastery fields. The monks expelled him, that his arms might be replaced by others. He sought to work for his children’s bread but found no work. Then he begged for it but was given nothing. When despair drove him to take back a little of the harvest gathered by his toil and the sweat of his brow, they seized and attacked him. His wife raised a cross over his grave. It will bear witness in the silence of the night beneath the stars to the tyranny of the monks. They have changed the teachings of the Nazarene into swords slashing at necks, the sharp edges cutting the bodies of the poor and weak.

After that the sun disappeared in twilight, as though it were weary of the cares of men and loathed their oppression. The evening began to weave a delicate veil from threads of dark and stillness and spread it over the body of nature.

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