The WDBWP’s challenge this week…take a reading of Kahlil Gibran: “work using a poem and speaking with the voice, style, rhythm and form the poet uses.

The People to the Prophet
Almustafa, your ship has come, and soon you will leave us to return to home far from the bright shores of Orpalese. Twelve years you’ve walked within our walls, twelve years you’ve walked to the hill outside our walls, searching seaward: awaiting to see your ship plow through the mist. Yet now that the day has come when you must depart, you hesitate although you rejoice.
You’ve known cold loneliness, but you’ve known love too. You’ve realized that your pain has increased your wisdom. Your pain will forever be with you and will forever bind you to our city, your memories are the children born from the many difficulties you’ve lived in a land not your own! You wonder then how can you leave us, for they and we and you are forever united.
Worry not, Almustafa, that your departure will cut you out of our hearts, or we out of yours. You cannot cast us off like a garment, nor we pretend that you are not closer to us than our own souls. We are each a part of the other’s intimacy and each a part of the other’s reality. The eagle in truth may fly alone, but it’s cry is heard from on high and all heed the shadow that crosses the sun, though they may not touch it. Your memory will be for us as the eagle, distant and mighty but forever present.
Your parting words will forever remain deeply embedded within our souls, your lessons learned, through the shining truths that your honey lips uttered in answer to our last request, O Prophet, will bind us together forever. Thus your wisdom shall not perish, for we shall keep your truths as our treasure and an heirloom for our children and our children’s children, this day will last throughout eternity.
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My copy of “The Prophet” with 12 illustrations from the author’s original drawings was printed by: Kustannusosakeythtio Otava Keuruu Finland 1976, Member of Finnprint. Distributed by Heinemann : London
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