Noble Rider

By Steven Breneman

An epic poem in alliterative verse reminiscent of Old English poetic form, Noble Rider concerns the nineteenth-century luminary named Bahaullah, the prophet founder of the Bahai faith. It is the first volume in a projected trilogy and addresses the life from birth in Tehran in 1817 to the public announcement of his mission in Baghdad in 1863. The son of a minister ascendant in the Qajar monarchy, Bahaullah was renowned from an early age for his brilliance, compassion, and breath-taking courage and integrity in speaking truth to power in the Shiah church-state system. Even while still in his twenties, he became known as the Father of the Poor. When a young merchant in Shiraz known as the Bab (the Gate) began to proclaim the advent of a great one who would usher in the coming of age of the human race, Bahaullah forfeited name and wealth in enthusiastically championing the promising cause. Iran was electrified and divided by the challenging call to renewal and modernization. Many were magnetized by its themes of human unfoldment, others fiercely resistant. Holocaust ensued. The Bab and twenty thousand of his followers were slaughtered. Alone among the leading figures to survive, Bahaullah was imprisoned and tortured and then exiled to Iraqbut not before receiving through mystic means, and from the Bab himself, clear indications of his station as the promised one.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Balboa Press
• Release date: Mar 25, 2016
• ISBN: 9781504351850

Steven Breneman

Raised in Hawaii and schooled at Punahou, Stanford, and the University of Sussex, S. Bret Breneman has taught English on all levels and in several countries for over forty years. His most famous former student is Barack Obama, whom he taught as an eighth grader at Punahou School in Honolulu. He is the author of an epic poem entitled Heroes of the Dawn, a children’s book, and numerous poems and articles. He is married and has six children and ten grandchildren.

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Copyright © 2016 S. Bret Breneman.

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ISBN: 978-1-5043-5184-3 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5043-5186-7 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-5043-5185-0 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016902987

Balboa Press rev. date: 03/25/2016

Contents

Canto One

Canto Two

Canto Three

Canto Four

Canto Five

Canto Six

Canto Seven

Canto Eight

Canto Nine

--for Anne--

Erelong will ye behold this Divine Youth riding upon the steed of victory.

---Baha'u'llah

Mounted on His steed, a red roan stallion of the finest breed, the best His lovers could purchase for Him, and leaving behind a bowing multitude of fervent admirers, He rode forth on the first stage of a journey that was to carry Him to the city of Constantinople.

--Shoghi Effendi

"Who was it passed her there on a horse all will,

What figure of capable imagination?"

--Wallace Stevens

Introduction

A pattern of advent has starred and animated history. At roughly millennial intervals, a spiritual luminary appears with energies of kindness, wisdom, and vision sufficient to generate a new stage in human development. A Moses arises, a Zoroaster, a Krishna, a Buddha, a Christ, a Muhammad. Emerging in the East, these Prophets, these Manifestations of God, bring a new Book, a new set of laws, a new calendar which serve to illumine the civilizing path leading humanity to its ultimate destiny.

These divine figures come as spring-bearers when a human winter has set in and merest lip-service is being paid to the noble precepts and moral guidance the previous Prophet embodied. But they necessarily come as iconoclasts. For through human immaturity their guidance has hardened over the centuries into dogma and bias---into a seal of ice closing off the wellsprings of love and understanding that have flowed as progress. Midwives of new creation, then, they preside over the pangs of the birth of a new era, a new stage of civilization.

Many regard Baha'u'llah (1817-1892) as the latest of these great figures, and Noble Rider attempts, however inadequately, to body forth in poetic form the spring-emergent phenomena that characterize His childhood and youth as Husayn Ali---the honored son of an honored minister of the Shah--, His early manhood as the disciple of His Holiness the Bab, and His mid-maturity as the manifest Prophet so stirringly heralded by the youthful and heroic Bab. This story, then, traces the course of Baha'u'llah's auspicious life from His birth in Tehran in 1817 to the declaration of His mission in Baghdad in 1863. It is, as you will see, a story of victory-in-defeat, of redemptive suffering writ large, and yet this book merely hints at the majestic fullness of His mission in Istanbul, Adrianople, and, finally, in Akka, Palestine.

It is my heart-felt wish that you will find soul-refreshing inspiration in this narrative, as assayed in the concentrated form of alliterative verse, and that, with me, you will experience uplifting wonderment at the vision of a figure arriving on the stage of history through the bloody ruins of mass execution and the rigors of lifelong exile and incarceration, triumphantly astride His steed.

Shoghi Effendi writes, The humanitarian and spiritual principles enunciated decades ago in the darkest East by Baha'u'llah and molded by Him into a coherent scheme are one after the other being taken by a world unconscious of their sources as the marks of progressive civilization. And the sense that mankind has broken with the past and that the old guidance will not carry it through the emergencies of the present has filled with uncertainty and dismay all thoughtful men save those who have learned to find in the story of Baha'u'llah the meaning of all the prodigies and portents of our time.

S. Bret Breneman

Canto One

1.1

As a tree stirring when the stern wind turned,

As the ocean surging with its curling swells,

The soul conceived for consummation

Grew as bidden as in a hidden garden.

A soothsayer seeing in a dream's showing

The closed coffer of the child's charisma

Which, opened, gleamed with treasures glinting,

Read jewels as letters in lustrous words.

And the Vazir received a sea-wide vision

Of his boy as youth on boundless waters

Where the liquid element was illumination

And the youth's black hair reached horizon:

Each raven strand held a fish, astonished,

The massed multitudes all moving

As the flaming face chose its faring.

The child's father could fathom these signs,

Knew well his scion was a son beyond him.

In state and stature to Heaven's standard,

He unfolded as champion of the undefended.

With hidden powers he helped the poor,

Brought the hungry to bounteous banquets

Where his generous ways sparked poets' genius

And the poor forgot their stark privation.

The sinister Prime Minister shared the amazement

At one who soared in ways of wonder,

Disdaining status for a stranger station,

Serving the nameless and undeserving

As though they were kings or were Cain-afflicted

Or were gemlike souls unknown sojourning

From God to God through mazy gardens,

Through darkness thickened by human dictates.

The Minister put by his menacing habits

And for just a moment honored true manhood:

Husayn Ali, who refused position,

Should be left to himself, for he seemed to dwell in

A higher realm, unswayed by riches

Or by reputation, loving landscapes--

Woods and valleys and bodies of water--

Roaming on foot or riding horseback.

Native of Nur, in Mazindaran mountains,

He savored nature as divine creation,

As the second Book with symbols secret,

Best read by the pure, hearts' scholars poring.

His father, famous for his widespread fortune,

For cultured accomplishment and character,

Named by the Shah Buzurg, the Great,

Without servility who served the monarch,

Minister majestic with humble demeanor--

Was humbled most by this soul his scion.

1.2

What long lines did the Most High limn

To trace the trove of His gene-treasure,

Greater greatness than the world has seen?

From beyond Mt. Damavand, white-crowned,

In Caspian forests far from the capital,

In the land of Nur, the province of light,

The soul descended from Sassanian monarchs,

From the Lord of zeal, Zarathustra,

From Abraham, father of all the faithful--

Though born in Tehran in a tryst of history---

Appeared in a mystery of hidden advent.

What was the nature, preceding all nurture,

Evinced in an infant who would never cry,

Was content in his cradle with a sage's calm?

The Vazir summoned a famed soothsayer

To consider the child's luminous countenance

And read each feature as perhaps foreshadowing

His destiny--for what lay ahead in the days

Of his manhood. The seer, magnetized,

Gazed on the boy, whose fresh soul's beauty

Charmed him as with prospective enchantment,

Convinced him of a concealed glory

Which would prove the truth of all the dreams:

"That dream of the boy free on the sea,

His long locks swaying whole schools of fish,

Signals ascendancy over the world.

No one will resist his march.

Despite the tempest of turmoil He arouses

Amidst all nations and human kindreds,

They will cling to Him as to the King of kings,

Each tribe gathered as at its trough.

Amidst the turbulence of ongoing trouble,

He will hold hard to God, safe from harm,

Lonely, undefended, but for the Friend."

Slight and delicate, but forged of iron,

Always going in fields and gardens,

Never ailing, his energy endless,

Unequaled equestrian, lover of verdure,

But devotee most of the poverty-stricken,

He learned as a boy the lesson of transience.

Might and munificence were faithless muses,

Were trusts whose tributes came but to dust.

His father's honor and his rumored fame

Owed nothing to his owning of several villages,

Of many mansions, estates and manors.

His father's gilding was a golden spirit,

His love for God his genuine gold.

Once at a puppet-show's pleasant sham

The boy broke through to vistas of bounty

And saw the illusion as the world's illusion:

The puppets put back in their baby-sized boxes

With miniature panoply of the tiny shah

Seemed men in their coffins in a zero accounting,

The might of a monarch the merest mirage.

This knowledge was innate, numinous within Him.

The poor, He knew, were not as veiled

And shone, unwitting, with the image of God.

As a prodigy famed the boy progressed,

His vision unfolding of outward prosperity

Based on detachment from prosperous things.

1.3

His father was friend to the Qaim Maqam,

The great Prime Minister who was mercy to Iran,

Whose moral character was beyond corruption,

Who was lord and beau of all belles lettres.

But the one in the era most prone to evil

With subtle insinuations slithering,

With discourse whispered in wise demonism,

Coiled like poison in the king's mazy ear,

Looping to the core of the Minotaur-labyrinth,

Until his serpent soul became the Shah,

And the heinous deed was hellishly done.

The great Prime Minister was ghoulishly murdered,

And Haji Mirza Aqasi, smirking,

Gathered his robes, dagger-lurking,

Around his sinuosity and ascended

To the place of power behind the Peacock Throne.

For this was the district of the Qajar Dynasty

When the glory of Masshad suffered the shahs' neglect

And the bast of high beauty was abased,

When Isfahan that was half the world

In the typology of its domes cerulean

Suffered defacement, Kufics of best music

Disdained by the fleas of royal progeny,

Promises of the Hidden Prophet,

Ordained to bless the land, so blemished

By ignorance as themselves to be hidden.

Bauble-bubbles of the ways of bribery

Seeping up from a sinful center

Like poison gases were the air polluted.

The proud, fair palace of Alpadana,

Raised by Darius and zealous Xerxes

Then burned by boyish Alexander,

Predicted Qajar catastrophes--

Persepolis presaging Persian ruin.

Now here was one raised up well-favored,

Praised and respected by rich and poor,

Descended from heights of noble heritage,

From major Prophets and majestic kings,

Precious prodigy of whom it was predicted

He wouldn't survive his cherished childhood,

Was too God-favored, too good for the world

To endure its pettiness. Some tales were legend,

Unfounded in fact but telling as fable--

As that at seven he defended his father

In a case at court involving land;

The boy-attorney turned through reason

The magistrates' minds in his father's favor.

It was general knowledge that as junior youth

His views were valued and often visited,

That dogmatism never diminished

The force of his discourse, nor notes of unkindness

Brought cacophony to his motifs.

But he firmly defended the Manifestations

And never let pass a point that demeaned

A Prophet of God in any manner.

And so when a mulla mighty in Mazindaran

Claimed that should the Christ Himself

Knock at his door with a noble summons

He would feel no need to hasten to answer,

The young man quietly, pointedly, commented,

"And should the Shah's executioner call

With ten armed men would you likewise disdain

To respond?" And the mulla got the message.

The clergy called his speech a marvel,

Termed his eloquence a torrent;

It drew them as one to their faltering feet.

He married a lovely, blue-eyed maiden

From the heights and canyons above the capital.

The end of the wagon-train of the goods

She brought to their auspicious wedded bourne

Could hardly be seen in the city labyrinth.

And she shared the wealth of his endless sympathy

For the poverty-stricken and the disadvantaged,

And through their intense and coupled compassion

They were Father and Mother of the poor.

1.4

The hellish Haji Mirza Aqasi

Had striven to ruin one so strong

In the court at Tehran, so highly counted

By the king as to be called by him the Great.

Mirza Buzurg could not be bribed,

But dealt in the open, in the light of day.

The new Prime Minister dwelt in murk,

Delved in darkness with perverse design,

And over time, through twisted wiles,

Cheated the child's father of his fortune,

Appropriating much of his property,

Slandering him with sighs of one aggrieved--

Vazir-visored as the righteous victim,

In the guise of one who was truly good.

So that model of a minister, Mirza Buzurg,

Declined defamed, his final days

Darkened but for his destined scion

And his dream of light with his son as sun.

As even the night gives way to day

And darkness can't hold off the light,

The Haji would brighten near the boy,

Felt a father's affection at his unfolding--

Touched by his kindness, his true concern.

Married now, Mirza Husayn Ali

Remained unguided by the mores

Of a corrupted court. Reverent when due,

He was not obsequious, would not defer

To arrogance masked as high position.

His respectfulness was full and real.

Offered his father's honored place,

He declined. His bounty was as boundless

As the sun, as free, as freely given,

Unconstrained by social convention or by

Grinning hidden ambition. His mansion

Was a seat of joy, a site of hope

And praising prayer, always open

To the poor, festive in the evenings with gala

Events, largesse pouring, laughter rising,

Conversation flowing, poets chanting,

Torchlight flaring through mosaic windows,

Long pond shimmering with stars and moon.

Yearning notes of Rumi rang.

Heavenly Hafiz poured mystic romance

So hearts were heaving towards the Beloved.

The scheming Aqasi also came

To the home of him who was friend to enemies

And joined the laughter and festivities,

That scene where worldly woes were forgotten,

Where royal rivalry seemed ridiculous,

And celebration raised thankful hands.

But the Prime Minister--his pointy hat

Reflected by his pointed beard,

His aba-cloak covered with mystic runes--

Took a liking to a village largely owned

By Mirza Husayn Ali--to the loveliness

Of its waters and lush oasis-growth.

Summoning the former minister's son,

He pressed to purchase Quch-Hisar,

But soon the saintly youth responded:

Had the property been his alone,

He would have complied. This transitory life,

With its sordid possessions, was hardly worthy

Of attachment in his eyes, how much less

This small and insignificant estate.

But several others, both rich and poor,

Some old, some young, shared ownership.

He requested the Haji seek their consent.

Displeased with such democracy,

The foxy Haji sought through fraud

To effect the purchase. But at these plottings

Husayn Ali, with the others' agreement,

Transferred title to the sister of the Shah,

Who had been bidding to buy the land.

The Haji was furious, sent forces to seize

The coveted village, but his men were met

By the sister's men defending her rights.

The Prime Minister then appealed to the Shah,

Whom he'd learned to control through spiritual claims.

But the sister, too, had wheedling wiles

And the night before had said: "O King of the age!

Remember those gems I wear in attendance

You have urged me to trade for some land of my choice?

I am ready now to do Your Majesty's bidding,

But the Haji seeks to derail my rights."

Forgo your claim, the Shah commanded

His Minister. It's my sister's village now.

The livid Haji little-knew defeat,

Was used to blockage toppling to his will.

Raging, he summoned the regal youth,

Upbraided and berated him, blamed him

For exploiting the power of the monarch

To frustrate his purpose, for vicious violation

Of property law to wreak some vengeance.

But to each sputtering attempt to discredit him,

Husayn Ali responded vigorously,

With clear logic, citing precedent,

His words