Don’t grieve. Anything you lose comes round
in another form. The child weaned from mother’s milk
now drinks wine and honey mixed.
God’s joy moves from unmarked box to unmarked box,
from cell to cell. As rainwater, down into flowerbed.
As roses, up from ground.
Now it looks like a plate of rice and fish,
now a cliff covered with vines,
now a horse being saddled.
It hides within these,
till one day it cracks them open.
Part of the self leaves the body when we sleep
and changes shape. You might say, “Last night
I was a cypress tree, a small bed of tulips,
a field of grapevines.” Then the phantasm goes away.
You’re back in the room.
I don’t want to make anyone fearful.
Hear what’s behind what I say.
Ta dum dum, taaa dum, ta ta dum.
There’s the light gold of wheat in the sun
and the gold of bread made from that wheat.
I have neither. I’m only talking about them,
as a town in the desert looks up
at stars on a clear night.
Translate by Coleman Bark with A.J.Arberry
Morning: a polished knifeblade,
the smell of white camphor burning.
The sky tears his blue Sufi robe
deliberately in half.
Daylight Rumi drags his dark opposite
out of sight. A happy Turk comes in.
A grieving Hindu leaves.
The King of the Ethiopians goes.
Caesar arrives.
No one knows how what changes,
changes.
One half of the planet is grass.
The other half grazing.
A pearl goes up for auction. No one has enough,
so the pearl buys itself.
We stand beside Noah and David and Rabia
and Jesus and Muhammed.
Quietness again lifts and planes out,
the blood in our heads gliding
in the sky of the brain.
Translate by Coleman Bark with A.J.Arberry
When grapes turn
to wine, they long for our ability to change.
When stars wheel
around the North Pole,
they are longing for our growing consciousness.
Wine got drunk with us,
not the other way.
The body developed out of us, not we from it.
We are bees,
and our body is a honeycomb.
We made
the body, cell by cell we made it.
Translate by Robert Bly
Totally conscious, and apropos of nothing, he comes to see me.
Is someone here? I ask.
The moon. The full moon is inside your house.
My friends and I go running out into the street.
I’m in here, comes a voice from the house, but we aren’t
listening.
We’re looking up at the sky.
My pet nightingale sobs like a drunk in the garden.
Ringdoves scatter with small cries, Where, Where.
It’s midnight. The whole neighborhood is up and out in
the street
thinking, The cat-burglar has come back.
The actual thief is there too, saying out loud,
Yes, the cat-burglar is somewhere in this crowd.No one pays attention.
Lo, I am with you always, means when you look for God,
God is in the look of your eyes,
in the thought of looking, nearer to you than your self,
or things that have happened to you.
There’s no need to go outside.
Be melting snow.
Wash yourself of yourself.
A white flower grows in the quietness.
Let your tongue become that flower.
Translate by Coleman Bark with A.J.Arberry
I have lived on the lip
of insanity, wanting to know reasons,
knocking on a door. It opens.
I’ve been knocking from the inside!
Translate by Coleman Bark with John Moyne
Forget your life. Say God is Great. Get up.
You think you know what time it is. It’s time to pray.
You’ve carved so many little figurines, too many.
Don’t knock on any random door like a beggar.
Reach your long hand out to another door, beyond where
you go on the street, the street
where everyone says, “How are you?”
and no one says How aren’t you?
Tomorrow you’ll see what you’ve broken and torn tonight,
thrashing in the dark. Inside you
there’s an artist you don’t know about.
He’s not interested in how things look different in moonlight.
If you are here unfaithfully with us,
you’re causing terrible damage.
If you’ve opened your loving to God’s love,
you’re helping people you don’t know
and have never seen.
Is what I say true? Say yes quickly,
if you know, if you’ve known it
from before the beginning of the universe.
Translate by Coleman Bark with A.J.Arberry
All day and night, music,
a quiet, bright
reedsong. If it
fades, we fade.
Translate by Coleman Bark with John Moyne
You are the notes, and we are the flute.
We are the mountain, you are the sounds coming down.
We are the pawns and kings and rooks
you set out on a board: we win or we lose.
We are lions rolling and unrolling on flags.
Your invisible wind carries us through the world.
Translate by Robert Bly
Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field. I’ll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase each other
doesn’t make any sense.
Translate by Coleman Bark with John Moyne
The drunkards are rolling in slowly, those who hold to wine are
approaching.
The lovers come, singing, from the garden, the ones with
brilliant eyes.
The I-don’t-want-to-lives are leaving, and the I-want-to-lives
are arriving.
They have gold sewn into their clothes, sewn in for those who
have none.
Those with ribs showing who have been grazing in the old
pasture of love
are turning up fat and frisky.
The souls of pure teachers are arriving like rays of sunlight
from so far up to the ground-huggers.
How marvellous is that garden, where apples and pears, both for
the sake of the two Marys,
are arriving even in winter.
Those apples grow from the Gift, and sink back into the Gift.
It must be that they are coming from the garden to the garden.
Tramlated by Robnt Bly
Outside, the freezing desert night.
This other night inside grows warm, kindling.
Let the landscape be covered with thorny crust.
We have a soft garden in here.
The continents blasted,
cities and little towns, everything
become a scorched, blackened ball.
The news we hear is full of grief for that future,
but the real news inside here
is there’s no news at all.
Translate by Coleman Bark with John Moyne
When it’s cold and raining,
You are more beautiful.
And the snow brings me
even closer to Your Lips.
The Inner Secret, that which was never born,
You are That Freshness, and I am with You now.
I can’t explain the goings,
or the comings. You enter suddenly,
and I am nowhere again.
Inside the Majesty.
Translate by Coleman Bark with A.J.Arberry
Praise to the emptiness that blanks out existence. Existence:
This place made from our love for that emptiness!
Yet somehow comes emptiness,
this existence goes.
Praise to that happening, over and over!
For years I pulled my own existence out of emptiness.
Then one swoop, one swing of the arm,
that work is over.
Free of who I was, free of presence, free of
dangerous fear, hope,
free of mountainous wanting.
The here-and-now mountain is a tiny piece of a piece
of straw
blown off into emptiness.
These words I’m saying so much begin to lose meaning:
Existence, emptiness, mountain, straw:
Words and what they try to say swept
out the window, down the slant of the roof.
Translate by Coleman Bark with John Moyne