Written by
Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi |
Oh, if a tree could wander and move with foot and wings! It would not suffer the axe blows and not the pain of saws! For would the sun not wander away in every night ? How could at ev’ry morning the world be lighted up? And if the ocean’s water would not rise to the sky, How would the plants be quickened by streams and gentle rain? The drop that left its homeland, the sea, and then returned ? It found an oyster waiting and grew into a pearl.
Did Yusaf not leave his father, in grief and tears and despair? Did he not, by such a journey, gain kingdom and fortune wide? Did not the Prophet travel to far Medina, friend? And there he found a new kingdom and ruled a hundred lands.
You lack a foot to travel? Then journey into yourself! And like a mine of rubies receive the sunbeams? print! Out of yourself ? such a journey will lead you to your self, It leads to transformation of dust into pure gold! Look! This is Love – Poems of Rumi, Annemarie Schimmel
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Written by
Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi |
There is a candle in your heart,
ready to be kindled.
There is a void in your soul,
ready to be filled.
You feel it, don’t you?
You feel the separation
from the Beloved.
Invite Him to fill you up,
embrace the fire.
Remind those who tell you otherwise that
Love
comes to you of its own accord,
and the yearning for it
cannot be learned in any school.
From: ‘Hush Don’t Say Anything to God: Passionate Poems of Rumi’
Translated by Sharam Shiva NEXT Poem Links Rumi Homepage Rumi Wisdom Mystical Poems of Rumi The Poetseers Sufi Poets
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Written by
Galway Kinnell |
I eat oatmeal for breakfast.
I make it on the hot plate and put skimmed milk on it.
I eat it alone.
I am aware it is not good to eat oatmeal alone.
Its consistency is such that is better for your mental health
if somebody eats it with you.
That is why I often think up an imaginary companion to have
breakfast with.
Possibly it is even worse to eat oatmeal with an imaginary
companion.
Nevertheless, yesterday morning, I ate my oatmeal porridge,
as he called it with John Keats.
Keats said I was absolutely right to invite him:
due to its glutinous texture, gluey lumpishness, hint of slime,
and unsual willingness to disintigrate, oatmeal should
not be eaten alone.
He said that in his opinion, however, it is perfectly OK to eat
it with an imaginary companion, and that he himself had
enjoyed memorable porridges with Edmund Spenser and John
Milton.
Even if eating oatmeal with an imaginary companion is not as
wholesome as Keats claims, still, you can learn something
from it.
Yesterday morning, for instance, Keats told me about writing the
"Ode to a Nightingale.
"
He had a heck of a time finishing it those were his words "Oi 'ad
a 'eck of a toime," he said, more or less, speaking through
his porridge.
He wrote it quickly, on scraps of paper, which he then stuck in his
pocket,
but when he got home he couldn't figure out the order of the stanzas,
and he and a friend spread the papers on a table, and they
made some sense of them, but he isn't sure to this day if
they got it right.
An entire stanza may have slipped into the lining of his jacket
through a hole in his pocket.
He still wonders about the occasional sense of drift between stanzas,
and the way here and there a line will go into the
configuration of a Moslem at prayer, then raise itself up
and peer about, and then lay itself down slightly off the mark,
causing the poem to move forward with a reckless, shining wobble.
He said someone told him that later in life Wordsworth heard about
the scraps of paper on the table, and tried shuffling some
stanzas of his own, but only made matters worse.
I would not have known any of this but for my reluctance to eat oatmeal
alone.
When breakfast was over, John recited "To Autumn.
"
He recited it slowly, with much feeling, and he articulated the words
lovingly, and his odd accent sounded sweet.
He didn't offer the story of writing "To Autumn," I doubt if there
is much of one.
But he did say the sight of a just-harvested oat field go thim started
on it, and two of the lines, "For Summer has o'er-brimmed their
clammy cells" and "Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours,"
came to him while eating oatmeal alone.
I can see him drawing a spoon through the stuff, gazing into the glimmering
furrows, muttering.
Maybe there is no sublime; only the shining of the amnion's tatters.
For supper tonight I am going to have a baked potato left over from lunch.
I am aware that a leftover baked potato is damp, slippery, and simultaneaously
gummy and crumbly, and therefore I'm going to invite Patrick Kavanagh
to join me.
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Written by
Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi |
Lord, said David, since you do not need us,
why did you create these two worlds? Reality replied: O prisoner of time,
I was a secret treasure of kindness and generosity,
and I wished this treasure to be known,
so I created a mirror: its shining face, the heart;
its darkened back, the world;
The back would please you if you’ve never seen the face.
Has anyone ever produced a mirror out of mud and straw?
Yet clean away the mud and straw,
and a mirror might be revealed.
Until the juice ferments a while in the cask,
it isn’t wine.
If you wish your heart to be bright,
you must do a little work.
My King addressed the soul of my flesh:
You return just as you left.
Where are the traces of my gifts? We know that alchemy transforms copper into gold.
This Sun doesn’t want a crown or robe from God’s grace.
He is a hat to a hundred bald men,
a covering for ten who were naked.
Jesus sat humbly on the back of an ass, my child!
How could a zephyr ride an ass?
Spirit, find your way, in seeking lowness like a stream.
Reason, tread the path of selflessness into eternity.
Remember God so much that you are forgotten.
Let the caller and the called disappear;
be lost in the Call.
- Rumi
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Written by
Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi |
i was dead
i came alive
i was tears
i became laughter all because of love
when it arrived
my temporal life
from then on
changed to eternal love said to me
you are not
crazy enough
you don’t
fit this house i went and
became crazy
crazy enough
to be in chains love said
you are not
intoxicated enough
you don’t
fit the group i went and
got drunk
drunk enough
to overflow
with light-headedness love said
you are still
too clever
filled with
imagination and skepticism i went and
became gullible
and in fright
pulled away
from it all love said
you are a candle
attracting everyone
gathering every one
around you i am no more
a candle spreading light
i gather no more crowds
and like smoke
i am all scattered now love said
you are a teacher
you are a head
and for everyone
you are a leader i am no more
not a teacher
not a leader
just a servant
to your wishes love said
you already have
your own wings
i will not give you
more feathers and then my heart
pulled itself apart
and filled to the brim
with a new light
overflowed with fresh life now even the heavens
are thankful that
because of love
i have become
the giver of light - Rumi.
Ghazal number 1393, translated by Nader Khalili
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Written by
Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi |
What will
our children do in the morning? Will they wake with their hearts wanting to play,
the way wings
should? Will they have dreamed the needed flights and gathered
the strength from the planets that all
men and women need to balance
the wonderful charms of
the earth so that her power and beauty does not make us forget our own? I know all about the ways of the heart – how it wants to be alive.
Love so needs to love
that it will endure almost anything, even abuse,
just to flicker for a moment.
But the sky’s mouth is kind,
its song will never hurt you, for I sing those words.
What will our children do in the morning
if they do not see us
fly? From Love Poems from God, by Daniel Ladinsky.
Copyright © 2002 by Daniel Ladinsky.
Reprinted by permission of the author.
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Written by
Adrienne Rich |
1
You, once a belle in Shreveport,
with henna-colored hair, skin like a peachbud,
still have your dresses copied from that time,
and play a Chopin prelude
called by Cortot: "Delicious recollections
float like perfume through the memory.
"
Your mind now, moldering like wedding-cake,
heavy with useless experience, rich
with suspicion, rumor, fantasy,
crumbling to pieces under the knife-edge
of mere fact.
In the prime of your life.
Nervy, glowering, your daughter
wipes the teaspoons, grows another way.
2
Banging the coffee-pot into the sink
she hears the angels chiding, and looks out
past the raked gardens to the sloppy sky.
Only a week since They said: Have no patience.
The next time it was: Be insatiable.
Then: Save yourself; others you cannot save.
Sometimes she's let the tapstream scald her arm,
a match burn to her thumbnail,
or held her hand above the kettle's snout
right inthe woolly steam.
They are probably angels,
since nothing hurts her anymore, except
each morning's grit blowing into her eyes.
3
A thinking woman sleeps with monsters.
The beak that grips her, she becomes.
And Nature,
that sprung-lidded, still commodious
steamer-trunk of tempora and mores
gets stuffed with it all: the mildewed orange-flowers,
the female pills, the terrible breasts
of Boadicea beneath flat foxes' heads and orchids.
Two handsome women, gripped in argument,
each proud, acute, subtle, I hear scream
across the cut glass and majolica
like Furies cornered from their prey:
The argument ad feminam, all the old knives
that have rusted in my back, I drive in yours,
ma semblable, ma soeur!
4
Knowing themselves too well in one another:
their gifts no pure fruition, but a thorn,
the prick filed sharp against a hint of scorn.
.
.
Reading while waiting
for the iron to heat,
writing, My Life had stood--a Loaded Gun--
in that Amherst pantry while the jellies boil and scum,
or, more often,
iron-eyed and beaked and purposed as a bird,
dusting everything on the whatnot every day of life.
5
Dulce ridens, dulce loquens,
she shaves her legs until they gleam
like petrified mammoth-tusk.
6
When to her lute Corinna sings
neither words nor music are her own;
only the long hair dipping
over her cheek, only the song
of silk against her knees
and these
adjusted in reflections of an eye.
Poised, trembling and unsatisfied, before
an unlocked door, that cage of cages,
tell us, you bird, you tragical machine--
is this fertillisante douleur? Pinned down
by love, for you the only natural action,
are you edged more keen
to prise the secrets of the vault? has Nature shown
her household books to you, daughter-in-law,
that her sons never saw?
7
"To have in this uncertain world some stay
which cannot be undermined, is
of the utmost consequence.
"
Thus wrote
a woman, partly brave and partly good,
who fought with what she partly understood.
Few men about her would or could do more,
hence she was labeled harpy, shrew and whore.
8
"You all die at fifteen," said Diderot,
and turn part legend, part convention.
Still, eyes inaccurately dream
behind closed windows blankening with steam.
Deliciously, all that we might have been,
all that we were--fire, tears,
wit, taste, martyred ambition--
stirs like the memory of refused adultery
the drained and flagging bosom of our middle years.
9
Not that it is done well, but
that it is done at all? Yes, think
of the odds! or shrug them off forever.
This luxury of the precocious child,
Time's precious chronic invalid,--
would we, darlings, resign it if we could?
Our blight has been our sinecure:
mere talent was enough for us--
glitter in fragments and rough drafts.
Sigh no more, ladies.
Time is male
and in his cups drinks to the fair.
Bemused by gallantry, we hear
our mediocrities over-praised,
indolence read as abnegation,
slattern thought styled intuition,
every lapse forgiven, our crime
only to cast too bold a shadow
or smash the mold straight off.
For that, solitary confinement,
tear gas, attrition shelling.
Few applicants for that honor.
10
Well,
she's long about her coming, who must be
more merciless to herself than history.
Her mind full to the wind, I see her plunge
breasted and glancing through the currents,
taking the light upon her
at least as beautiful as any boy
or helicopter,
poised, still coming,
her fine blades making the air wince
but her cargo
no promise then:
delivered
palpable
ours.
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Written by
Rudyard Kipling |
Our Lord Who did the Ox command
To kneel to Judah's King,
He binds His frost upon the land
To ripen it for Spring --
To ripen it for Spring, good sirs,
According to His Word.
Which well must be as ye can see --
And who shall judge the Lord?
When we poor fenmen skate the ice
Or shiver on the wold,
We hear the cry of a single tree
That breaks her heart in the cold --
That breaks her heart in the cold, good sirs,
And rendeth by the board.
Which well must be as ye can see --
And who shall judge the Lord?
Her wood is crazed and little worth
Excepting as to burn,
That we may warm and make our mirth
Until the Spring return --
Until the Spring return, good sirs,
When Christians walk abroad;
When well must be as ye can see --
And who shall judge the Lord?
God bless the master of this house,
And all who sleep therein!
And guard the fens from pirate folk,
And keep us all from sin,
To walk in honesty, good sirs,
Of thought and deed ad word!
Which shall befriend our latter end.
.
.
.
And who shall judge the Lord?
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Written by
Thomas Hardy |
I
"Percussus sum sicut foenum, et aruit cor meum.
"
- Ps.
ci
Wintertime nighs;
But my bereavement-pain
It cannot bring again:
Twice no one dies.
Flower-petals flee;
But, since it once hath been,
No more that severing scene
Can harrow me.
Birds faint in dread:
I shall not lose old strength
In the lone frost's black length:
Strength long since fled!
Leaves freeze to dun;
But friends can not turn cold
This season as of old
For him with none.
Tempests may scath;
But love can not make smart
Again this year his heart
Who no heart hath.
Black is night's cope;
But death will not appal
One who, past doubtings all,
Waits in unhope.
De Profundis
II
"Considerabam ad dexteram, et videbam; et non erat qui cognosceret me
When the clouds' swoln bosoms echo back the shouts of the many and
strong
That things are all as they best may be, save a few to be right ere
long,
And my eyes have not the vision in them to discern what to these is
so clear,
The blot seems straightway in me alone; one better he were not here.
The stout upstanders say, All's well with us: ruers have nought to
rue!
And what the potent say so oft, can it fail to be somewhat true?
Breezily go they, breezily come; their dust smokes around their
career,
Till I think I am one horn out of due time, who has no calling here.
Their dawns bring lusty joys, it seems; their eves exultance sweet;
Our times are blessed times, they cry: Life shapes it as is most
meet,
And nothing is much the matter; there are many smiles to a tear;
Then what is the matter is I, I say.
Why should such an one be here?
Let him to whose ears the low-voiced Best seems stilled by the clash
of the First,
Who holds that if way to the Better there be, it exacts a full look
at the Worst,
Who feels that delight is a delicate growth cramped by crookedness,
custom, and fear,
Get him up and be gone as one shaped awry; he disturbs the order
here.
De Profundis
III
"Heu mihi, quia incolatus meus prolongatus est! Habitavi cum
habitantibus Cedar; multum incola fuit aninia mea.
"--Ps.
cxix.
There have been times when I well might have passed and the ending
have come -
Points in my path when the dark might have stolen on me, artless,
unrueing -
Ere I had learnt that the world was a welter of futile doing:
Such had been times when I well might have passed, and the ending
have come!
Say, on the noon when the half-sunny hours told that April was nigh,
And I upgathered and cast forth the snow from the crocus-border,
Fashioned and furbished the soil into a summer-seeming order,
Glowing in gladsome faith that I quickened the year thereby.
Or on that loneliest of eves when afar and benighted we stood,
She who upheld me and I, in the midmost of Egdon together,
Confident I in her watching and ward through the blackening heather,
Deeming her matchless in might and with measureless scope endued.
Or on that winter-wild night when, reclined by the chimney-nook
quoin,
Slowly a drowse overgat me, the smallest and feeblest of folk there,
Weak from my baptism of pain; when at times and anon I awoke there -
Heard of a world wheeling on, with no listing or longing to join.
Even then! while unweeting that vision could vex or that knowledge
could numb,
That sweets to the mouth in the belly are bitter, and tart, and
untoward,
Then, on some dim-coloured scene should my briefly raised curtain
have lowered,
Then might the Voice that is law have said "Cease!" and the ending
have come.
|
Written by
Robert William Service |
You want me to tell you a story, a yarn of the firin' line,
Of our thin red kharki 'eroes, out there where the bullets whine;
Out there where the bombs are bustin',
and the cannons like 'ell-doors slam --
Just order another drink, boys, and I'll tell you of Soulful Sam.
Oh, Sam, he was never 'ilarious, though I've 'ad some mates as was wus;
He 'adn't C.
B.
on his programme, he never was known to cuss.
For a card or a skirt or a beer-mug he 'adn't a friendly word;
But when it came down to Scriptures, say! Wasn't he just a bird!
He always 'ad tracts in his pocket, the which he would haste to present,
And though the fellers would use them in ways that they never was meant,
I used to read 'em religious, and frequent I've been impressed
By some of them bundles of 'oly dope he carried around in his vest.
For I -- and oh, 'ow I shudder at the 'orror the word conveys!
'Ave been -- let me whisper it 'oarsely -- a gambler 'alf of me days;
A gambler, you 'ear -- a gambler.
It makes me wishful to weep,
And yet 'ow it's true, my brethren! -- I'd rather gamble than sleep.
I've gambled the 'ole world over, from Monte Carlo to Maine;
From Dawson City to Dover, from San Francisco to Spain.
Cards! They 'ave been me ruin.
They've taken me pride and me pelf,
And when I'd no one to play with -- why, I'd go and I'd play by meself.
And Sam 'e would sit and watch me, as I shuffled a greasy deck,
And 'e'd say: "You're bound to Perdition,"
And I'd answer: "Git off me neck!"
And that's 'ow we came to get friendly, though built on a different plan,
Me wot's a desprite gambler, 'im sich a good young man.
But on to me tale.
Just imagine .
.
.
Darkness! The battle-front!
The furious 'Uns attackin'! Us ones a-bearin' the brunt!
Me crouchin' be'ind a sandbag, tryin' 'ard to keep calm,
When I 'ears someone singin' a 'ymn toon; be'old! it is Soulful Sam.
Yes; right in the crash of the combat, in the fury of flash and flame,
'E was shootin' and singin' serenely as if 'e enjoyed the same.
And there in the 'eat of the battle, as the 'ordes of demons attacked,
He dipped down into 'is tunic, and 'e 'anded me out a tract.
Then a star-shell flared, and I read it: Oh, Flee From the Wrath to Come!
Nice cheerful subject, I tell yer, when you're 'earin' the bullets 'um.
And before I 'ad time to thank 'im, just one of them bits of lead
Comes slingin' along in a 'urry, and it 'its my partner.
.
.
.
Dead?
No, siree! not by a long sight! For it plugged 'im 'ard on the chest,
Just where 'e'd tracts for a army corps stowed away in 'is vest.
On its mission of death that bullet 'ustled along, and it caved
A 'ole in them tracts to 'is 'ide, boys -- but the life o' me pal was saved.
And there as 'e showed me in triumph, and 'orror was chokin' me breath,
On came another bullet on its 'orrible mission of death;
On through the night it cavorted, seekin' its 'aven of rest,
And it zipped through a crack in the sandbags, and it wolloped me bang on the breast.
Was I killed, do you ask? Oh no, boys.
Why am I sittin' 'ere
Gazin' with mournful vision at a mug long empty of beer?
With a throat as dry as a -- oh, thanky! I don't much mind if I do.
Beer with a dash of 'ollands, that's my particular brew.
Yes, that was a terrible moment.
It 'ammered me 'ard o'er the 'eart;
It bowled me down like a nine-pin, and I looked for the gore to start;
And I saw in the flash of a moment, in that thunder of hate and strife,
Me wretched past like a pitchur -- the sins of a gambler's life.
For I 'ad no tracts to save me, to thwart that mad missile's doom;
I 'ad no pious pamphlets to 'elp me to cheat the tomb;
I 'ad no 'oly leaflets to baffle a bullet's aim;
I'd only -- a deck of cards, boys, but .
.
.
it seemed to do just the same.
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