ULUGH BEG* / (1394-1449) Poem by Henry Luque

Ulugh Beg, I have travelled on so much dust
to be near the Stars you fashioned.
I want to keep warm for an instant
- allow me this boon -
under the celestial cloak, it is cold
and we will die while the night passes.

In the firmament I see your hand stretched out.
An old, millenary man told me
that due to your cosmogonical passion
you became a brother of the sky.

And now I see you as if it were yesterday:
every star that you discover
you burnish and keep in the motherland of your heart.
Your stature is a walking phosphorescense.

Humbly I join the homage.
The madrasah puts the minarets in rhythmical row
to lodge your coming,
the sand of the desert stops whistling
so that the only thing that enters its ear
is your intense word of malachite.

King on earth,
blessed by the multitude,
the orbits know
that you were also
khan of infinite space.

In a time of rigid obscurity
you filled the void with oracular numbers.
Archer of radiant pulse
your arrow defeated the blackness,
your arm scared ignorance
and you even left flashes of wisdom
to the barbarians that tore up your life.

The blue silence
of Samarkand,
the erect brightness
of Bukhara
preserve your gaze in a coffer,
and the mosques
fly
to put the flower of dawn
on the shores of your name.

I touch
the firmament
you went over with your hand,
I touch
the sextant
that will make me travel
to where the grandfathers
of the topaz dome sparkle.

I feel a shudder all over
when I go up the grand staircase
that took you to the incorporeal realm.
You, habitué of the white perfection,
you who never acted out of balance,
spill the attribute of the spark
on this disoriented human race.