Hoshang Merchant

“Circulation of Song after Rumi

Once again I'm climbing the mountain
Circle on circle like a winding rose
Below me the mountains fall away like rose-petals
I wish to be at the centre of the mystic rose
Where I shall meet Him

He shall greet me:
Beloved! So long in coming --
He shall be the lonely pine tree
On the flattened promontory
And I, the spider clinging to Him
by a mere thread, against the sun and the wind

Each dawn the sunrise tinting gold the burnt Sienna houses
Each dusk the alpine rosy glow on the mountain
Each afternoon such darkness in the glen
Fold on fold in a foliage all the shades of green:
They have crept into my dream

He is the air I breathe
Purest mountain-air: I'm cleaned
He is the lark's descant
And in the evening, the nightingale
He is the star's ascent and the moon's cloud-hiding
He is all the circles and in this circulation
of song: I read you / you read me circulating

In my blood from head to heel
He is the fruit of my unfulfilled life
The peach pooped with juice
And running with the Argentine waters, the pear
In the Chinese nectarine flecked like a child's cheek with red
And in the sour loquat and the sweet cherry

In the fragrance of the jasmine of India
And the Shiraz rose that makes the bee mad for them
In the grape that becomes wine to suffuse my cheek
In the olive that becomes a lamp to shine through my cupped hands

In these and not only in these does He circulate

Pouring from the sun at 5' o'clock as if at noon
Dancing on the lake, pure honey
And all the chatter over tea!
But in the quiet you find me out
You find me out

Plucking myself from Me
So that I become you
The breath in my nape-nerve
Sweetly saying: I bow to the God in you”
― Hoshang Merchant, The Book of Chapbooks

“When did the Zionist learn to torture people? In Hitler's concentration camps. Some natures forgive, most natures avenge, on the unsuspecting weakest. Where does the Arab direct his anger against Israel? On other Arabs. Rats in a cage turn on each other. A victim learns to victimize. Arab nations (Egypt) made peace with Israel, instead of supporting Palestine. Some Palestinians say they are not Arabs, but the 'sea-people' of the Ramses II's inscription; that they came from Crete rather than Arabia to settle on the floor of the prehistoric sea Thetys in order to claim Palestine as their separate nation. This should balance Israel's Abrahamic claim, if not outstrip it. The Palestinians were the first Jews, then Monophysites under Byzantium, then Moslems. 'We are all schismatics,' says a character in Genet's Palestine Diary.”
― Hoshang Merchant, Rebel Angel: Collected Prose of Hoshang Merchant