A Second Special Poem For Valentine's Day

[RonPrice]

This is the 2nd of my Valentine's Day 2012 poems. This piece of writing provides a quite personal perspective for the occasion and will, therefore, only appeal to a few of the internet's 2 billion users and its 280 million sites.-Ron Price, Tasmania

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GETTING IT OFF

 

In April 1937 Vivien Leigh, one of the most popular actresses of the 20th century, had been in a rapturous sexual relationship1 with Laurence Olivier for nearly two years. At the time both of them were married to someone else. Olivier was a major actor-interpreter of Shakespeare for his time. Leigh had just begun her acting career. In that same month, April 1937, the Baha’i teaching Plan opened. Leigh moved in with Olivier 8 weeks later. And so began one of the famous romances of the twentieth century. Leigh had the intuition, some time in May of 1937, after reading Gone With the Wind which had won the Pulitzer Prize that year, that she would play the part of Scarlett O’Hara in the movie Gone With the Wind. And so she did: on Christmas Day 1938 she was offered a contract for the part. And so began her life of Hollywood fame.

 

In 1932 Vivien Leigh had married. She was not yet 19. That year, the Greatest Holy Leaf, the sister of Baha’u’llah, the Founder of the Baha’i Faith, died. She was, it could be said, the last treasured remnant of the Heroic Age of the Baha’i Faith. Shoghi Effendi, who had himself married several weeks before the outset of that Plan, referred to this sister of Baha’u’llah as “the treasured Remnant of Baha’u’llah.”2 The Heroic Age had drawn to a close and, with 1932, its last remnant was laid to rest on Mt. Carmel. Nabil’s Dawnbreakers, the history of that Heroic Age, was also published that year. That great Heroic Age had, indeed, ‘gone with the wind,’ as the novel of 1936 by the same name put it. –Ron Price with appreciation to 1Michael Sauter, “Love Lives-Laurence Olivier & Vivien Leigh,” Internet Site, 2005; and 2Shoghi Effendi, Letter From Shoghi Effendi, July 17th 1932.

 

They had absolutely no idea

that that holy enterprise had

also got off. Uninterrupted

prosecution yielded many an

unimaginable blessing, and it

entailed such very far-reaching

consequences for our age, and

our time, and our very destiny.

 

The 25th anniversary1 of ‘Abdu’l-Baha’s

visit to America was not commemorated

by these two famous lovers in 1937 as

the Heroic Age inevitably slipped into

history’s abyss, gone-with-the-wind:

as that star-studded, historical cinema

epic, the highest grossing film in the

then history Hollywood with a record-

breaking number of Academy Awards

was about to translate the 1000 page

Pulitzer Prize winning novel into the

most expensive film then produced.2

 

The American Baha’is in that same month

embarked on a sublime historic mission

which would release the potentialities

with which that enterprise had been so

mysteriously endowed far into a future

Golden Age which we would never see.

 

1 1912-1937

2 Gone With The Wind cost 4 million dollars to produce, a record-breaking sum. The use of so may “extras” was a significant cost.

 

Ron Price October 2nd 2005

Updated on: 14/2/'12