My Response To Rumi

RESPONSE TO RUMI Tell the Friend I’m coming, with a wine sack and a thirst. Been too long in solitude, got a sickness in my bones. Pray? Where was Shams when my need was so great? “Suffer the pain…it’s the only rule”, you said. When governed by nafs you are like the dry mule Being steered away from the trough into the hot sun. To become a garden one must, first, be a desert; To become a lover one must, first, be a seeker. The Master says, “Love is your true health… The wine we always mention.” And the Dervish Dances, a dust mote in this “play of presences”. He knows the door to reality is an illusion, A delusion…one drink away…and he dances. So come with me, my Sufi friend, and heal me, Take this empty goblet and fill me up! Let’s get totally sick and submerge ourselves In the sweet springwater. Let the wine flow! Let love flow! Bathe our “body, soul, shadow”. Dec. 3/16 ~ for contest Response to Rumi quote: "If you desire healing, let yourself fall ill, let yourself fall ill." - Jelaluddin Rumi NOTES: All quoted passages are Rumi himself, mostly form his Rubai quatrains. The word nafs is from the Qur’an and refers to the lower self, the ego. This is really a dialogue through a third party to Rumi (until the last five lines when we do meet) using his teachings and writing style (or as close as we can get via translations ~ Coleman Barks does the best for me), that is, laying out the problem, discuss the viewpoints and then find a resolution. Sorry about the tail-rhyme, you can replace the word flow in line 17 with spill but I think you’ll find it carries more weight as a rhyming couplet. Actually, I worked very hard not to rhyme, there were two others that I was able to erase from my original draft.