Sol 5.6

  1. Tell Spring, when you pass by his prison:

    “Prisons are the schools of the free.”

  2. You entered it willingly, and I found you steadfast:

    your imprisonment sets thought free.

  3. If they hide you, then your thought raises high

    a light that illuminates the night-traveler’s path.

  4. How often darkness veils a lofty mountain,

    while above its peaks the light of a beacon gleams.

  5. Indeed, in your silence we hear wisdom,

    and in your hidden face we see guidance.

  6. When souls strip themselves bare for their aims,

    they can dispense with hearing and sight.

  7. Far be it from you to grieve—and how should we grieve over

    the knowledge that the full moon follows the moonless dark?

  8. Have not the prophets known a time when

    they chose solitude freely and by choice?

  9. They took refuge in retreats and secluded themselves there,

    amid the harshness of life, clad in rags,

  10. mustering their strength and disciplining their hearts

    so their mission might stand firm against dangers.

  11. And from the hidden depths where they spent their nights,

    they sent forth guidance like the sun in the season of bloom.

  12. Ask the solitary one on Mount Sinai,

    who spoke with the Almighty amid the thunderclap of fire.

  13. Ask the specter of Golgotha, when wasting hunger had left

    of him only radiance in a robe of white.

  14. Ask the solitary one at Hira, answering his Lord,

    in the cave, what befell him in that cave.

  15. Through solitude they became complete; many a discipliner

    of the soul has freed it by taking it captive.

  16. Nothing brings those who call others toward their hopes more surely

    than the hand of destiny testing and refining them.

Sol 5.6