TIGERS, LEOPARDS, LIONS

"These beasts only attack those who fear them or
those whom they fear..."
Elifas Levy, The Magic of the Mages

In the royal gardens of Assyria
they were melancholy wanderers, they were benevolent stalkers
the tigers, the leopards, and the lions.
In chambers of porphyry and inside libraries
within ziggurats they yearned and were silent
they did not roar, they neither hunted nor stalked
they were without danger or freedom
and yet they were very alive.

What was it so enchanted these creatures
that are docile only in lovemaking
so that they became almost domesticated?

Sentinels could not explain this,
nor courtiers - not even the king.
Only the mages, the royal astronomers
knew the secret of their strange docility.

All night, obsessed by clairvoyance
they dreaded that the heavens
might prove treacherous, that the people
might be deprived of their links
with the astral gleam which made
the colossal creatures tame
and full of unnatural tenderness,
flesheaters who relinquished flesh.

May the tigers, the leopards and the lions
remember forever
that time when they were exalted and became objects
of love

may the energies released in that link with the astral
never cease
and may the immortality of light
remain the force that links us
to those feline souls.

Translated by Ilija Casule and Thomas Shapcott

© Katica Kulavkova, 2001-2007.
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