"the hour is nigh; the waning Queen walks forth to rule the later night; crown'd with the sparkle of a Star, and throned on orb of ashen light: The Wolf-tail sweeps the paling East to leave a deeper gloom behind, and Dawn uprears her shining head, sighing with semblance of a wind: the highlands catch yon Orient gleam, while purpling still the lowlands lie; and pearly mists, the morning-pride, soar incense-like to greet the firmament.."
Sir Richard Francis Burton, posing as his friend Haji Abdu, expressed his Sufi-inspired views of Life in this philosophical poem which I first read, in my early 20's, having been motivated by the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayam, a passage of which was required reading in a high school class......it expressed a fatalism with which I am now comfortable, but at that time, in 1962, when I was 17 and living in Huntsville, Alabama, was new territory......that, after i went there, was more familiar than the places that i had visited before......
pragmatic sensualist, motivated by really deep instincts, actualized by willful imaginings and perpetuated by other's desires. Abstract, yet clear in purpose, honest, but abstruse, my moods change like winds and water with my confidences, and when ungrounded, i am both guarded and vulnerable, leaning, in darkness, to the Light, nurtured by instinctual feelings arising from a deep gene pool.
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