I seem to have loved you in numberless forms, numberless times, in life after life and in age after age forever. My spell-bound heart has made and re-made the necklace of songs that you take as a gift and wear around your neck in your many forms, in life after life and in age after age forever. Whenever I heard old chronicles of love, its age-old pain, its ancient tale of being apart or together, as I stare on and into the past, in the end you emerge clad in the light of a pole-star piercing the darkness of time: you became an image of what is remembered forever.
You and I have floated here on the stream that brings from the fount at the heart of time love of one for another. We have played alongside millions of lovers, shared in the same shy sweetness of meeting, the same distressful tears of farewell-old love, but in shapes that renew and renew forever. Today it is heaped at your feet, it has found its end in you, the love of all man’s days both past and forever: universal joy, universal sorrow, universal life, the memories of all loves merging with this one love of ours-and the songs of every poet past and forever.
No Ordinary Sun Tree let your arms fall: raise them not sharply in supplication to the bright unhallowed cloud. Let your arms lack toughness and resilience for this is no more axe to blunt, nor fire to smother. Your sap shall not rise again to the moon’s pull. No more incline a differential head to the wind’s talk, or stir to the tickle of coursing rain. Your former shagginess shall not be wreathed with the delightful flight of birds nor shield nor cool the ardor of unheeding lovers from the monstrous sun.
Tree let your naked arms neither fall nor extend vain entreaties to the radiant ball. This is no gallant monsoon’s flash, no dashing trade wind’s blast. The fading green of your magic emanations shall not make pure again these polluted skies for this is no ordinary sun, o tree in the shadow less mountains the white plains and the drab sea floor your end at last is written.
