I am a child for whom the pages are not less than the book,
for whom days are not smaller than dreams.
Yesterday in a prophet's dream I read of Al-Kawthar,
which means the abundant & God-given good
or perhaps a single river in Paradise.
But all rivers are the river Platonic, the river of the mind of God;
in Chios he sang of a god who was a river, of his wrath.
And what is the river that circles the world but a mirror?
Ocean may be ocean or the ungraspable phantom of life,
all her intangible malice but a white ubiquitous whale;
& I may be a morsel in her belly, carried unaware to Nineveh
to be reborn a symbol & a sign.