29 Mehr 1404
Quatrain 58 of 75
“Oh Thou, who Man of baser Earth didst make,
And who with Eden didst devise the Snake;
For all the Sin wherewith the Face of Man
Is blacken'd, Man's Forgiveness give—and take!”
Reflection · Autumn 1404
The autumn accounting — the sin ledger, the fall from Eden that is the fall of the year, the face blackened by what the year has been — all of this is autumn's particular territory. And Khayyam asks for the mutual forgiveness that autumn makes necessary. Who with Eden didst devise the Snake — the autumn snake is the snake of ending, of loss. It was devised in the first garden. It appears every autumn. It was always going to appear.
Give and take. In autumn the forgiveness runs in both directions, at the end of a season that gave and took in equal and sometimes unjust measure.