امرأة بلا اسم (اسمها الشعر)
امرأة بلا وجه (وجهها ضياء الفجر)
امرأة بلا عطر (عطرها الحنين)
امرأة بلا وجود (هي كل زمن وكل مكان)
امرأة بلا صوت (صوتها همس في الصلاة)
امرأة في قلبي
،تفيض من عمق أشواقه
،تغمره ولا تحتويه
،تشربه ولا ترويه
،تحرقه فتحييه
امرأة هي الحب بذاته
.والوجه الخفي للاله
Tag: Sufism
Haiku # 489
Lune sur mer…
mon cœur un piège
de vent nomade
Driving home in the hour before dawn, after watching Ahmad Hawili in a Sufi evening. His deeply passionate and powerful voice, the music, the whirling dervishes, and the energy of that event were still at work in me, whirling, propelling me into the meeting of the moon and the sea. O nomad heart, so fond and embittered by its own restlessness; o poet heart, whose desire for love wills the bitterness into the sweetest wine.
You who offer wine, we are waiting on the lip of the ocean of ruin. Hafiz
الله في جسدها
لفح عطرها
لم يبق من قلبي
الا وهج نار متقدة
على مذبح العشق
وها نار حبها
في شراييني تمددت
حتى لم يبق مني
الا تأوه الأزهار
مع انبلاج الفجر
الريح تأتي
والريح تذهب
وأنا ههنا أحترق
في ماء عطرها
أضلعي ودمائي وحياتي
عني في حبها ذابت
ذوبان الصلاة
في فم الخمر
الله في جسدها
وجسدها في الله
في ضوءها عرش الوجود
ومصدر الخلق
Hafez – Become A Lover
Don’t tell the mysteries of drunkenness and love
To a pedant. Let him pass away on his own,
With his ignorance and self-centerdness still inside.
If you feel weak, feeble, and powerless, well,
So does the breeze. Being sick on the Path is a hundred
Times better than a healthy mind in a healthy body.
As long as you see yourself as learned and intellectual,
You’ll lodge with the idiots; moreover, if you
Can stop seeing yourself at all, you will be free.
If you are living in your dear one’s castle, don’t even think
About the heavens above; because if you do
You’ll drop like a stone to the filth-covered street.
Become a lover; if you don’t, one day the affairs of the world
Will come to an end, and you’ll never have had even
one glimpse of the purpose of the workings of space and time.
On the spiritual road, being uncooked and raw
Is a mark of unbelief; it’s best to move along the path
Of fortune with nimbleness and springy knees.
In a nook safe from blame, how can we stay
Secluded when your dark eye reminds us
Always of the joy and mysteries of drunkenness?
Long ago I had a premonition of these riots
That have now occurred, when with a proud turn
Of the head you refused to sit quietly with us.
Although the thorn hurts your spirit, the rose asks pardon
For this wound; the sourness of wine is more easily tolerated
When one remembers the sweet flavor of drunkenness.
Hafez, your love is going to turn you over to the rough hand
Of the hurricane. Why did you imagine that, like a lightning
Bolt, you could free yourself from this storm?
— Hafez, The Angels Knocking on the Tavern Door, translated by Robert Bly and Leonard Lewisohn
أحمد حويلي – رسل البيادر
The Turn
Unable to find you
out in the world
I turned inward
to the source
of incompletion and ache
and found that my heart
in its reckless longing
was erecting itself
as a temple
with your light for its pillars,
with your love
an unshakable fountain of joy
revolving in its center.
I turned inward
but then, marvelous inversion!
your light flowed out
and etched itself
into the fiber of the world.
Where are you now?
A fluid motion
moving all around,
a moving ocean
without edges or shores
hovering nimbus
over the entire creation,
sweeping it in its onrush
to the center of the soul.
Who are you now?
All the names
that ever went down in history
and all the names
that fell out,
forgotten and unknown,
you are the source of naming itself,
and the hover of silence
in the secret heart of dawn.
Bringing me Home
You live in me
as that which gives the diamond
its sheen,
as the radiance inside
the rays of sunlight,
as the secret unfolding
in the blue hush of dawn.
You live in me
but how
it cannot be said,
and as these metaphors
try to utter your how
my heart implodes
with a spaciousness
the entire universe
cannot begin to fill.
You live in me
in a way I cannot reason
or explain,
in a way I can only fathom
by opening up to you
and drinking the beauty and the pain
of my surrender.
You live in me
and through your living
I realize how everything in you
is an eternal beginning,
that life is a flowering spring
even in the midst of winter and death,
even in the throes of shattering of loss.
Long ago
your absence whispered in my ear
and my heart
became an altar of longing
burning with the oil
of your secret:
in you everything is completed,
in you the circle is full.
So abandon me
and let the pain of your abandonment
cut deepest into my skin,
for that is how you push the seed in me
through the soil of your garden,
awakening me to your light
and bringing me home.
Evoking the Beloved
My poem
tries to evoke her,
but silence cannot fit
in the mouth of the sky.
Thus my inked birds
go fluttering about senseless
like embers escaping
a raging fire,
their burning wings searing
the face of the air.
My inked birds
flutter about senseless
but who deciphers their song
as it rains over the earth?
A learned mystic once said
that the beloved is too great
for this world to contain
so existence tears at its seams
and her waters spill
soaking up this world
and all others,
becoming in all things
their inner vibrancy and life.
My poem
tries to evoke her,
but then my heart swells so wide
I find my pen leaving silence
to ink the last line.
In the Company of Death
Why must we isolate the world of the dead?
This awe before the spaces incubating
the bodies of those who travelled upstream
through the dark river — what is it?
Is it from fear of incurring
the violence of death
that our hearts tremble?
That stirring the deathly sleep infects us
with an indelible stain,
a stain waxing to engulf us
and immerse us in the dark realm?
Or is it to preserve those we loved
and who under the dark arch have passed?
The bodies of those we loved,
the playgrounds of our fondest
intimacies and memories
now so fragile that a most supple breeze
scatters their dark fires
and dissolves their limbs
like wisps in the air?
To preserve them, yes,
but also to save ourselves the pain
of watching those we loved
more than life itself dissolve
as the boundless hunger of death
feasts upon their flesh.
Or it is before the unknown that we tremble,
and death being the ultimate, impenetrable mystery?
And yet, ‘die before you die’ the Sufi said.
Wandering Thought # 28
Poetry is no pastime or leisurely endevour; it is life and death and so is the vessel flooding with their secrets, unfolding their most inward temple. Poetry, we are drawn to it as a moth to a flame, a lover to his beloved, and is hence tyrannical, irrational, and unfree. We pursue it as though we are submitting to a fate most sublime and kingly, one elevating us to our highest height, even in the solitude of our woods and cloisters, even as it burns us slowly and achingly in the abysses of darkness and depression. For poetry — as philosophy, and all spiritual arts — is a lone star, is a solitary act and endeavour, one communing us with existence in its entirety, planting us like a quivering seed in the fountainhead of God, there to vanish and become the house of eternity.
Coleman Barks – On The Turn
The “turn,” the moving meditation done by Mevlevi dervishes, originated with Rumi. The story goes that he was walking in the gold-smithing section of Konya when he heard a beautiful music in their hammering. He began turning in harmony with it, an ecstatic dance of surrender and yet with great centered discipline. He arrived at a place where ego dissolves and a resonance with universal soul comes in. Dervish literally means “doorway.” When what is communicated moves from presence to presence, darshan occurs, with language inside the seeing. When the gravitational pull gets even stronger, the two become one turning that is molecular and galactic and a spiritual remembering of the presence at the center of the universe. Turning is an image of how the dervish becomes an empty place where human and divine can meet. To approach the whole the part must become mad, by conventional standards at least. These ecstatic holy people, called matzubs in the sufi tradition, redefine this sort of madness as true health.
When he saw the dervishes in Cairo in 1910, Rainer Maria Rilke, the great spiritual poet of this century, said they turn was a form of kneeling. “It is so truly the mystery of kneeling of the deeply kneeling man. With Rumi the scale is shifted, for in following the peculiar weight and strength in his knees, he belongs to that world in which height is depth. This is the night of radiant depth unfolded.” December 17 is celebrated each year as Rumi’s Wedding Night, the night he died in 1273 and reached full union.
— Coleman Barks, Rumi, Selected Poems (Penguin Classics)
Letter, January 31, 2016
Your breath emanates my poem — given what poetry is to me, do you realize the depth of that image? Oh, how your breath lives in me! But, to me, poetry is so much more than this beat pulsing in my heart; poetry is the very substance of life, the interiority of it weaving its forms and outer shells. Poetry is the essence — and you, the essence of that essence. I am dizzy feeling this intuition, contemplating it, allowing it to take and overtake me. But deeper than the intoxication with which it floods my veins this intuition and image fills me with clarity as a dawn like calmness submerges and raises me to a sky hitherto unknown. I live at the root from which the world and existence draw substance and life, from and into which everything flows and perishes and is reborn. Your breath, Beloved, emanates my poem, and doing so it annihilates me into you. What now remains of me? I do not know for you have filled me. I am now your overflow, the sheer beauty of your face spilling grace and emanating the world.
How you live in me
I live with your voice,
seashells against my ears
roaring inside of me
the wildness of your waves,
thus all poetry inked by my fingers
is but the froth your sea,
your pearled secrets
inside of me twisting and twirling
and pouring out
the eternal dream,
the deepest reality.
Rumi – The Milk of Millennia
“I am part of the load
not rightly balanced.
I drop off in the grass,
like the old cave-sleepers, to browse
wherever I fall.
For hundreds of thousands of years I have been dust grains
floating and flying in the will of the air,
often forgetting ever being
in that state, but in sleep
I migrate back. I spring loose
from the four-branched, time-and-space cross,
the waiting room.
I walk into a huge pasture.
I nurse the milk of millennia.
Everyone does this in different ways.
Knowing that conscious decisions
and personal memory
are much too small a place to live,
every human being streams at night
into the loving nowhere, or during the day,
in some absorbing work.”
— Rumi
David Whyte – What to Remember When Waking
In that first
hardly noticed
moment
in which you wake,
coming back
to this life
from the other
more secret,
moveable
and frighteningly
honest
world
where everything
began,
there is a small
opening
into the new day
that closes
the moment
you begin your plans.
What you can plan
is too small
for you to live.
What you can live
wholeheartedly
will make plans
enough
for the vitality
hidden in your sleep.
To be human
is to become visible
while carrying
what is hidden
as a gift to others.
To remember
the other world
in this world
is to live in your
true inheritance.
You are not
a troubled guest
on this earth,
you are not
an accident
amidst other accidents
you were invited
from another and greater
night
than the one
from which
you have just emerged.
Now, looking through
the slanting light
of the morning
window toward
the mountain
presence
of everything
that can be,
what urgency
calls you
to your
one love?
What shape waits
in the seed of you
to grow and spread
its branches
against a future sky?
Is it waiting
in the fertile sea?
In the trees
beyond the house?
In the life
you can imagine
for yourself?
In the open
and lovely
white page
on the waiting desk?
Senryu # 123
Silent joy of now…
a full moon whirling,
dervish in the sky
Queen of Flow
More than her sexiness
and sensual appeal
it was her light
that attracted him,
the deep receptiveness of her heart
that surged through her face
like a moon filling the sky,
the aura of her being
overtaking him
like the waters of the sea
call out the sailing ship,
opening him to the horizons
of eternity.
Letter July 18, 2015
Long enough, longer than I can remember I have been writing you, a poem whirling a full circle in the sanctity of your womb. And now I realize, with each flick of pen it is you who have been pouring through me, pouring me into you, back into the essence. Now I realize how writing you I was poured out of myself and into your river, decanted in your ocean until nothing of me was left, until my body was no more than the husk of its former self, now a chalice overpouring with the glory of your waters, your radiance, your love. Love, lead me to the bewildered center and there root me, in you, unhinge me from myself, a cloud losing itself in its sky-passion, a poem singed by your fated sigh.
Rumi – Granite and Wineglass
You are granite.
I am an empty wineglass.
You know what happens when we touch!
You laugh like the sun coming up laughs
at a star that disappears into it.
Love opens my chest, and thought
returns to its confines.
Patience and rational considerations leave.
Only passion stays, whimpering and feverish.
Some men fall down in the road like dregs thrown out.
Then, totally reckless, the next morning
they gallop out with new purposes. Love
is the reality, and poetry is the drum
that calls us to that. Don’t keep complaining
about loneliness! Let the fear-language of that theme
crack open and float away. Let the priest come down
from his tower, and not go back up!
~ Rumi
Rumi – The Reed Flute’s Song
Listen to the story told by the reed,
of being separated.
“Since I was cut from the reedbed,
I have made this crying sound.
Anyone apart from someone he loves
understands what I say.
Anyone pulled from a source
longs to go back.
At any gathering I am there,
mingling in the laughing and grieving,
a friend to each, but few
will hear the secrets hidden
within the notes. No ears for that.
Body flowing out of spirit,
spirit up from body: no concealing
that mixing. But it’s not given us
to see the soul. The reed flute
is fire, not wind. Be that empty.”
Hear the love fire tangled
in the reed notes, as bewilderment
melts into wine. The reed is a friend
of all who want the fabric torn
and drawn away. The reed is hurt
and salve combining. Intimacy
and longing for intimacy, one
song. A disastrous surrender
and a fine love, together. The one
who secretly hears this is senseless.
A tongue has one customer, the ear.
A sugarcane flute has such effect
Because it was able to make sugar
in the reedbed. The sound it makes
is for everyone. Days full of wanting,
let them go by without worrying
that they do. Stay where you are
inside such a pure, hollow note.
Every thirst gets satisfied except
that of these fish, the mystics,
who swim a vast ocean of grace
still somehow longing for it!
No one lives in that without
being nourished every day.
But if someone doesn’t want to hear
the song of the reed flute,
it’s best to cut conversation
short, say good-bye, and leave.
Rooted in Love 