I was looking at my book by Kahlil Gibran called The Prophet because of a photo I had seen on Twitter quite recently. I picked up the book and looked inside to see that I had originally bought this small hardcover book in 1969. It was a strange purchase for a 20 year-old at that time, perhaps at any time. However, it wasn’t the first book of poetry that I had bought. That honour went to Leonard Cohen’s small paperback book of poetry called Spice Box of the Earth, a book that is not in my collection any longer which I bought in Montreal in the late spring of 1967.
My book collection had been seriously reduced as I downsized in many ways [shrinking in height included]. However, My first books of poetry were gifts to me from my maternal grandmother who had also given me a hardcover edition of Dante’s, Divine Comedy. My first conscious naturist experiences were with my grandmother’s books of poetry in a meadow surrounded by trees . It was a tough time for me as a teenager, and her poetry books became part of a number of unconscious responses that ended up saving my life. You can read about this in the first book of my autobiography, A Broken Boy.
There are twenty-eight sections in the book by Gibran. in the second section, the prophet speaks about love, which is personified as a “he.”
“Like sheaves of corn he gathers you unto himself.
He threshes you to make you naked.
He grinds you to whiteness.
He kneads you until you are pliant;
And then he assigns you to his sacred fire,
that you may become sacred bread for God’s sacred feast.”Gibrah, Kahlil – The Prophet, 1969, p.12
Now that I am significantly older, I can better appreciate these words which must have seemed quite contradictory when I was younger. However, back then, it was the word prophet, and the sections “On Crime and Punishment” and “On Good and Evil” that most caught my attention. Well, to be truthful, the illustrations were also a factor in my appreciating the book. Regardless, I devoured the book and still continue to return to it. Now, I am planning on creating my own version of this book, complete with illustrations. We’ll see how this intention pans out in the years to come.
I will return to another poem within the book, very soon.