10 Poetry - In your light I learn how to love

 

One of the most startling is, “Our loving is the way God’s secret gets told!” Love is an open secret, the most obvious thing in the world and the most hidden, with no why to how it keeps its mystery. Sufis say the genesis of lovers meeting is God’s sweetest secret.

 

FIVE THINGS

 

I have five things to say,

five fingers to give into your grace.

First, when I was apart from you,

this world did not exist, nor any other.

Second, whatever I was looking for

was always you.

Third, why did I ever learn to count to three?

Fourth, my cornfield is burning!

Fifth, this finger stands for Rabia,8

and this is for someone else.

Is there a difference?

Are these words or tears?

Is weeping speech?

What shall I do, my love?

So the lover speaks, and everyone around

begins to cry with him, laughing crazily,

moaning in the spreading union

of lover and beloved.

This is the true religion. All others

are thrown-away bandages beside it.

This is the sema of slavery and mastery dancing together. This is not-being.

I know these dancers.

Day and night I sing their songs

in this phenomenal cage.

 

 

 

 

THE MANY WINES

 

God has given us a dark wine so potent that,

drinking it, we leave the two worlds.

God has put into the form of hashish a power

to deliver the taster from self-consciousness.

God has made sleep

so that it erases every thought.

 

God made Majnun love Layla so much

that just her dog would cause confusion in him.10

There are thousands of wines

that can take over our minds.

Don’t think all ecstasies

are the same!

Jesus was lost in his love for God.

His donkey was drunk on barley.

Drink from the presence of saints,

not from those other jars.

Every object, every being,

is a jar full of delight.

Be a connoisseur,

and taste with caution.

Any wine will get you high.

Judge like a king, and choose the purest,

the ones unadulterated with fear,

or some urgency about “what’s needed.”

Drink the wine that moves you

as a camel moves when it’s been untied,

and is just ambling about.

 

 

 

COOKED HEADS

 

I have been given a glass

that has the fountain of the sun inside,

a Friend in both worlds, like the fragrance

of amber inside the fragrance of musk.

My soul-parrot gets excited with sweetness.

Wingbeats, a door opening in the sun.

You’ve seen the market where they sell

cooked heads: that’s what this is,

a way of seeing beyond inner and outer.

A donkey wanders the sign of Taurus.

Heroes do not stay lined up in ranks

for very long. I set out for Tabriz,

even though my boat is anchored here

 

 

YOU  ARE  NOT  YOUR  EYES

 

Those who have reached their arms

into emptiness are no longer concerned

with lies and truth, with mind and soul,

or which side of the bed they rose from.

If you are still struggling to understand,

you are not there. You offer your soul

to one who says, “Take it to the other

side.” You’re on neither side, yet

those who love you see you on one side

or the other. You say Illa, “only God,”

then your hungry eyes see you’re in

“nothing,” You’re an artist

who paints both with existence and non.

Shams could help you see who you are,

but remember, You are not your eyes.

 

.

PUT  THIS  DESIGN  IN  YOUR  CAR  PET

 

Spiritual experience is a modest woman

who looks lovingly at one man.

It’s a great river where ducks live

happily, and crows drown. The visible

bowl of form contains food that is both

nourishing and a source of heartburn.

There is an unseen presence we honour

that gives the gifts.

You’re water. We’re the millstone.

You’re wind. We’re dust blown up into shapes.

You’re spirit. We’re the opening and closing

of our hands. You’re the clarity.

We’re this language that tries to say it.

You’re joy. We’re all the different kinds

of laughing. Any movement or sound

is a profession of faith, as the millstone

grinding is explaining how it believes

in the river! No metaphor can say this,

but I can’t stop pointing to the beauty.

Every moment and place says,

“Put this design in your carpet!”

 

 

THE DEATH OF SALADIN

 

You left ground and sky weeping,

You left ground and sky weeping,

mind and soul full of grief.

No one can take your place in existence

or in absence. Both mourn,

the angels, the prophets, and this sadness

I feel has taken from me the taste of language, so that I can’t say the flavour of

my being apart. The roof

of the kingdom within has collapsed!

When I say the word you, I mean

a hundred universes.

Pouring grief of water, or secret dripping

in the heart, eyes in the head or eyes

of the soul, I saw yesterday

that all these flow out to find you

when you’re not here.

That bright fire bird Saladin

went like an arrow, and now the bow

trembles and sobs.

If you know how to weep for human beings,

weep for Saladin.

 

 

 

I’M NOT SAYING THIS RIGHT

 

You bind me, and I tear away in a rage

to open out into air, a round

brightness, a candlepoint,

all reason, all love.

This confusing joy, your doing,

this hangover, your tender thorn.

You turn to look, I turn.

I’m not saying this right.

I am a jailed crazy who ties up spirit-women.

I am Solomon.

What goes comes back. Come back.

We never left each other.

A disbeliever hides disbelief,

but I will say his secret.

More and more awake, getting up at night,

spinning and falling in love with Shams.

 

 

 

CLOSE TO BEING TRUE

 

How can we know the divine qualities

from within? If we know only

through metaphors, it’s like when

children ask what sex

feels like and you answer, “Like candy,

so sweet.” The suchness of sex

comes with being inside the pleasure.

Whatever you say about mysteries,

I know or I don’t know, both are close to being true. Neither is quite a lie.

 

 

THE SOUL’S FRIEND

 

Listen to your essential self, the Friend.

When you feel longing, be patient,

and also prudent, moderate with eating and drinking.

Be like a mountain in the wind.

Do you notice how it moves? There are sweet

illusions that arrive to lure you away.

Make some excuse to them, “I have indigestion,”

or “I need to meet my cousin.”

You fish, the baited hook may be fifty

or even sixty gold pieces, but is it really

worth your freedom in the ocean?

When traveling, stay close to your bag.

I am the bag that holds what you love.

You can be separated from me!

Live carefully in the joy of this friendship.

Don’t think, But those others love me so.

Some invitations sound like the fowler’s whistle to the quail, friendly, but not

quite how you remember the call of your soul’s Friend.

 

 

 

THE SUN RISE RUBY

 

In the early morning hour,

just before dawn, lover and beloved wake

to take a drink of water.

She asks, “Do you love me or yourself more?

Really, tell the absolute truth.”

He says, “There’s nothing left of me.

I’m like a ruby held up to the sunrise.

Is it still a stone, or a world

made of redness? It has no

resistance to sunlight.”

The ruby and the sunrise are one.

Be courageous and discipline yourself.

Completely become hearing and ear,

and wear this sun-ruby as an earring.

Work. Keep digging your well.

Don’t think about getting off from work.

Water is there somewhere.

Submit to a daily practice.

Your loyalty to that

is a ring on the door.

is a ring on the door.

Keep knocking, and the joy inside

will eventually open a window

and look out to see who’s there.