Rain-Brian Crain.
Excerpt from
I purified my lips with sacred fire that I might speak of love,
In the past, O people, you asked me about the wonders
It consumes my faculties and melts my emotions and desires.
the echoes of laughter and joy,submitting to an unseen
power that slays me,then gives me life,then slays me again
and again until dawn breaks and light fills the corners
of my room.Then I sleep.Yet behind my spent eyelids forms
of wakefulness dance and on my stony blanket sway the phantoms of dreams.
What is this unconditioned thought that comes
Who among you would not forsake your father and your mother
and your home if the girl whom your heart loved were to call to him?
Who among you would not cross the seas, traverse deserts,
go over mountains and valleys to reach the woman whom his spirit has chosen?
"The Beloved: Reflections on the Path of the Heart"
Kahlil Gibran
but when I opened my mouth to speak,I found myself mute.
I sang the melodies of a love I did not yet know,but when I came
to know it,the words became a muffled whisper in my mouth,
the songs in my breast a profound silence.
and delights of love, and you found satisfaction in what I told you.
But now, when love has draped me with its robes,
I in my turn come to ask you about its ways and virtues. 
Is there one among you who can answer me?
I come to ask you about what is in me and
wish you to tell me of my own soul.
Is there one among you who can explain my heart to my own
heart, who can explain my essence to my essence itself?
Will you not tell me what is this fire kindled in my breast?
What are these invisible hands,soft yet coarse,that grip
my spirit in my hours of solitude and loneliness?
Into my heart they pour wine mixed with the bitterness
of pleasure and the sweetness of pain.
What are these things rustling about my couch in the silence
of the night as I watch makeful for what I know not,listening
to what I do not hear,starting at what I do not see,pondering
what I do not comprehend,aware of what I do not apprehend,
sighing because in sighs are the groanings more beloved to me
than
What is this which we call 'love'?
Tell me what is this hidden mystery concealed beyond the ages,
lurking behind appearances,yet making its home
in the heart of being?
as the cause
of all effects, as the effect of all causes?
What is this wakefulness that encompasses both death and life
and molds them into a dream stranger than life and deeper than death?
Tell me, O people, tell me! Who among you would not wake
from the sleep of life if love were to brush your spirit
with its fingertips?
What youth would not follow his heart to the ends of the earth
to breathe the sweetness of his lover's breath, feel the soft
touch of her hands, delight in the melody of her voice?
What man would not immolate his soul that its smoke might rise
to a god who would bear his plea and answer his prayer?
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