The Traveller's Litany

The Traveller addresses the silent deity:
    "From the brazen cathedral, the pilgrim comes,
    To this secret landscape; I beg you, hold,
    Look amid the twilight sands,
    Where neither day nor night can compete,
    For internal despair afflicts all,
    When eyes exult, and distance makes the lost forgotten,
    Striking near to the core of me,
    When I see your beloved temple in decay."

Mithras stirs and speaks:
    "My son and daughter have forsaken me,
    And I have placed them in the sands,
    Lifeless and cold, they survive,
    They that sorrow vast and boundless,
    And molder near the ruins that sink alone,
    And which sunk my shattered remains."

Traveller:
    "All that I have seen fails to draw the rising cause,
    That, over a child, enchants the line of understanding,
    But remains deaf to the learned sense of silence,
    I have watched and kept all that I am from my fate,
    Do I come to this place at destiny's cusp,
    To find that destiny has come too late?
    You are gifted to draw the children's line well after,
    His land lies in the west, her moon in the east.
    Summon the prodigals up from the sand, my Mithras,
    Do not beg to be forgotten."

Mithras:
    "On this desert, tell words of sand,
    You, the traveller who is the last of my faithful,
    Stand around those who sneer,
    On whose lips the land was mocked,
    The land that met the king half-fed.
    I do not beg to be forgotten,
    I will not suffer to be remembered."

Traveller:
    "Can none teach that any place may be bred like breath,
    How lies scar the truth, sent mad in their difference;
    Nor, on certain air, who listens most of it all away,
    Take the neighbors' defeat and triumph in shame?"

Mithras:
    "Look mighty, yet handle it well,
    Carve your passions in stone;
    A calm despair can only bury you,
    Like me, an antique of the sands."

Traveller:
    "Is there death now, and heavenly honor?
    With winter, we turn the fingers of afternoon.
    When the slant of light departs from us,
    Weight gives shadows being, but they are difficult, secret things."

Mithras:
    "The names, the lies, the legends, the monuments,
    Both of the king and the sculptor, trunkless, they appear,
    And in my heart, I feel but a wrinkled visage
    Of the Traveller I once was."

Traveller:
    "After all, have you ignored yearnings, my icon?
    Long ago, I learned passions in the fires of youth,
    That a beautiful burning, when extinguished, expires,
    I have found raptures in simplicity, like the dog at my feet;
    I have felt the lance in my soul when I have gone unseen."

Mithras drifts in his thoughts and does not seem to hear.
    "Is that colossal pedestal,
    From which I, beloved, once commanded,
    Stamped bare with decay?"

Traveller:
    "A seal undeniably imperial, the throne of our one,
    His meanings are harder bred than any cruelty or love,
    Is it a play of the winds where you are now known?
    Is it because of their tunes that we hear nothing?"

Mithras does not answer.

The Traveller begins the journey back to the nameless city.