Collected Poems - Sri Aurobindo Ashram

ACHAB
Poems from Manuscripts 287
And the flint,
The fuel? Who made these or formed the hands
That lit the fire? the lips that prove him nothing?
Or who gave thee thy clear and sceptic brain,
Thy statecraft and thy bold and scornful will
Despising what thou usest? Was it thou
That mad’st them?
ESARHADDON
No, my parents did. Say then
The seed is God that touched my mother’s womb
And by familiar process built this house
Inhabited by Esarhaddon.
ACHAB
Fashioned the seed?
ESARHADDON
Who
It grew from other seed,
That out of earth and water, light and heat,
And ether, eldest creature of the world.
All is a force that irresistibly
Works by its nature which it cannot help,
And that is I and that the wood and flint,
That Achab, that Assyria, that the world.
ACHAB
Howcametheforceinbeing?
It is.
ESARHADDON
From of old