Gibran Khalil 

gibran04.jpg (14929 bytes)

The Forerunner 

The Forerunner  The Last Watch 
Love  The King-Hermit
The Lion's Daughter Tyranny
The Saint The Plutocrat
The Greater Self War and The Small Nations
Critics Poets
The Weather-cock The King of Aradus
Out of my Deeper Heart Dynasties
Knowledge and Half Knowledge A Sheet of Snow-White Paper
The scholar and the Poet Values
Other Seas Repentance
The Dying Man and the Vulture Beyond my Solitude

Beyond My Solitude
Beyond my solitude is another solitude, and to him who dwells therein my aloneness is a crowded market-place and my silence a confusion of sounds.
Too young am I and too restless to seek that above-solitude. The voices of yonder valley still hold my ears and its shadows bar my way and I cannot go.
Beyond these hills is a grove of enchantment and to him who dwells therein my peace is but a whirlwind and my enchantment an illusion.
Too young am I and too riotous to seek that sacred grove. The taste of blood is clinging in my mouth, and the bow and the arrows of my fathers yet linger in my hand and I cannot go.
Beyond this burdened self lives my freer self; and to him my dreams are a battle fought in twilight and my desires the rattling of bones.
Too young am I and too outraged to be my freer self.
And how shall I become my freer self unless I slay my burdened selves, or unless all men become free?
How shall the eagle in me soar against the sun until my fledglings leave the nest which I with my own beak have built for them?