Kahlil Gibran: War

One night a feast was held in the palace, and there came a man and
prostrated himself before the prince, and all the feasters looked
upon him; and they saw that one of his eyes was out and that
the empty socket bled.  And the prince inquired of him, “What has
befallen you?”  And the man replied, “O prince, I am by profession
a thief, and this night, because there was no moon, I went to rob
the money-changer’s shop, and as I climbed in through the window
I made a mistake and entered the weaver’s shop, and in the dark I
ran into the weaver’s loom and my eye was plucked out.  And now,
O prince, I ask for justice upon the weaver.”
 
Then the prince sent for the weaver and he came, and it was decreed
that one of his eyes should be plucked out.
 
“O prince,” said the weaver, “the decree is just.  It is right that
one of my eyes be taken.  And yet, alas! both are necessary to me
in order that I may see the two sides of the cloth that I weave.
But I have a neighbor, a cobbler, who has also two eyes, and in
his trade both eyes are not necessary.”
 
Then the prince sent for the cobbler.  And he came.  And they took
out one of the cobbler’s two eyes.
 
And justice was satisfied.

Public Domain

Gibran Khalil Gibran (1883 – 1931), usually referred to in English as Kahlil Gibran, was a Lebanese-American writer, poet and visual artist best known as the author of The Prophet, which was first published in the United States in 1923 and has since become one of the best-selling books of all time, having been translated into more than 100 languages, but that enthusiasm has not been shared by critics. His paintings and drawings of sinuous idealized nudes belong to symbolism and art nouveau and are, thus, a survival of a tradition rejected both by American realists and European abstractionists. His writing with its earnest didactic romanticism—found no favor with critics whose models were the cool intellectualism of James Joyce and T. S. Eliot or the gritty realism of Ernest Hemingway. As a result, Gibran has been dismissed as a popular sentimentalist by critics and historians of art and of literature. There are signs that this situation is changing, at least on the literary side, as critics become more sensitive to the characteristics of immigrant writing. [adapted from The Poetry Foundation website).