SINCE THE FIRST day-break of human age misted with myths,

they walk wonder-eyed on strange shores, the seekers,

and the fighters march at the drum-beats of storm gods

towards an ever-distant time,

along an endless stretch of battle-fields.

The earth trembles at the ceaseless treads of deadly pursuits,

the midnight sleep is troubled,

the easeful life is embittered

and death is made precious.

Those who rushed out at the urge of the road

ever move on beyond the boundaries of death,

and those who clung to their homes

are doomed to lie perpetually encased in the shell of a rigid

life in a soulless world.

Who is there who must be lured by an insipid peace,

by a stagnant stinking security,

and dully choose to build his shelter in a realm of ghosts?

In the beginning man found himself

at the cross-road of existence.

The provision of his journey was given him of his blood,

in his dream, in his path itself.

When he sat down to fix his plan and raised his tower high among clouds its base crumbled away;

he built his dyke only to let it be swept away by floods.

Time and again he fell asleep in his hall of tired carousal

in the gasping light of smoke-bedimmed lamps,

till a sudden assault of a nightmare choked him,

rattled his ribs together

and he woke up in a groaning agony of death.

A sudden awakening has often startled him forth

from the ring-fence of decrepit centuries

towards undefined horizons,

and an impulse forced him away from the fetter of his swollen success,

reminding him that pillars of triumph across Time's chariot-path

bury the builder under their nameless ruins.

He hastens to join the army of the wreckers of patterns

coming from all ages,

crossing hills,

breaking stone walls,

bursting iron gates

while the sky throbs with the drum-beats of Eternity.