Showing posts with label found poetry. Show all posts
Showing posts with label found poetry. Show all posts
Monday, October 18, 2010
Friday, March 05, 2010
Longing
Poems, that fill the moment, from this Sufi poetry site:
Awakened by your love,
I flicker like a candle's light
tryin to hold on in the dark.
Yet, you spare me no blows
and keep asking,
"Why do you complain?"
Rumi - "Whispers of the Beloved" - Maryam Mafi & Azima Melita Kolin
I flicker like a candle's light
tryin to hold on in the dark.
Yet, you spare me no blows
and keep asking,
"Why do you complain?"
Rumi - "Whispers of the Beloved" - Maryam Mafi & Azima Melita Kolin
Let sorrowful longing dwell in your heart,
never give up, never losing hope.
The Beloved says, "The broken ones are My darlings."
Crush your heart, be broken.
Shaikh Abu Saeed Abil Kheir - "Nobody, Son of Nobody" - Vraje Abramian
Longing itself brings the cure.
The only rule is, Suffer the pain.
Your desire must be disciplined,
and what you want to happen
in time, sacrificed.
Rumi - The Essential Rumi - Coleman Barks
Tuesday, February 23, 2010
Brothers, my peace is in my aloneness
Brothers, my peace is in my aloneness.
My Beloved is alone with me there, always.
I have found nothing in all the worlds
That could match His love,
This love that harrows the sands of my desert.
If I come to die of desire
And my Beloved is still not satisfied,
I would live in eternal despair.
To abandon all that He has fashioned
And hold in the palm of my hand
Certain proof that He loves me---
That is the name and the goal of my search.
Rabi'a Al-'Adawiyya (717 - 801)
My Beloved is alone with me there, always.
I have found nothing in all the worlds
That could match His love,
This love that harrows the sands of my desert.
If I come to die of desire
And my Beloved is still not satisfied,
I would live in eternal despair.
To abandon all that He has fashioned
And hold in the palm of my hand
Certain proof that He loves me---
That is the name and the goal of my search.
Rabi'a Al-'Adawiyya (717 - 801)
Sufi poet
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
paradoxes
October 5
All through eternity
Beauty unveils His exquisite form
in the solitude of nothingness;
He holds a mirror to His Face
and beholds His own beauty.
He is the knower and the known,
the seer and the seen;
No eye but His own
has ever looked upon this Universe.
His every quality finds an expression:
Eternity becomes the verdant field of Time and Space;
Love, the life-giving garden of this world.
Every branch and leaf and fruit
Reveals an aspect of His perfection.
The cypress give hint of His majesty,
The rose gives tidings of His beauty.
Whenever Beauty looks,
Love is also there;
Whenever beauty shows a rosy cheek
Love lights Her fire from that flame.
When beauty dwells in the dark folds of night
Love comes and finds a heart
entangled in tresses.
Beauty and Love are as body and soul.
Beauty is the mine, Love is the diamond.
They have together since the beginning of time-
Side by side, step by step.
--
This is love:
to fly toward a secret sky,
to cause a hundred veils to fall each moment.
First, to let go of life.
In the end, to take a step without feet;
to regard this world as invisible,
and to disregard what appears to be the self.
Heart, I said, what a gift it has been
to enter this circle of lovers,
to see beyond seeing itself,
to reach and feel within the breast.
From:
The Divani Shamsi Tabriz, XII
from http://www.mikeshane.org/r
My sun is gone and I am cold and gray
October 6
And after the sun leaves, there are the long dark walks. The sharp wind carries away all thought, and I am cold and clean and empty.
October 13
I walk again in the dark--skin pricked with cold, yet I am warm. What is lost feels nearer than before, what is given up lingers in my smile, what I possess no more fills the cold night. Longing hushed, presence overwhelms me. In the dark, light glows beneath my eyelids. In the cold, warmth radiates out of me.
Those old Sufi poets knew this--when they sang of their beloved, Spirit beyond flesh. Those theologians of the early church with their allegories, who saw Deity between the lines of the lover. Solomon's Shulamite made God.
He is gone, yet He is here. No longer mine, he is Everywhere.
Love fills the night, so that the darkness is yet another aspect of light, the cold so that frozen air is yet another side of warmth.
I leave behind the whispering of the sky and the wind and the trees, yet the wonder stays with me.
Jalāl ad-Dīn Muḥammad Rūmī says:
All through eternity
Beauty unveils His exquisite form
in the solitude of nothingness;
He holds a mirror to His Face
and beholds His own beauty.
He is the knower and the known,
the seer and the seen;
No eye but His own
has ever looked upon this Universe.
His every quality finds an expression:
Eternity becomes the verdant field of Time and Space;
Love, the life-giving garden of this world.
Every branch and leaf and fruit
Reveals an aspect of His perfection.
The cypress give hint of His majesty,
The rose gives tidings of His beauty.
Whenever Beauty looks,
Love is also there;
Whenever beauty shows a rosy cheek
Love lights Her fire from that flame.
When beauty dwells in the dark folds of night
Love comes and finds a heart
entangled in tresses.
Beauty and Love are as body and soul.
Beauty is the mine, Love is the diamond.
They have together since the beginning of time-
Side by side, step by step.
--
This is love:
to fly toward a secret sky,
to cause a hundred veils to fall each moment.
First, to let go of life.
In the end, to take a step without feet;
to regard this world as invisible,
and to disregard what appears to be the self.
Heart, I said, what a gift it has been
to enter this circle of lovers,
to see beyond seeing itself,
to reach and feel within the breast.
From:
The Divani Shamsi Tabriz, XII
from http://www.mikeshane.org/r
Monday, August 06, 2007
Young passions
I'm packing up my apartment right now for an impending move to my very own one bedroom next week. Right now I'm in the unpleasant stage of going through all the papers that I had neatly (or not so neatl
y) stacked and stuck at random into my bookcases along with the books. I come across an old folder of stories, and what seems to have been the beginning brainstorm for a poem, written in the margin of some torn manuscript printout I had been editing. I used to write so much--and so much like this. Why don't I write like this anymore? Even if it was a bit flowery and occasionally cliched, it had more passion in it than I can muster up these days. I wonder if all my passion has gone into academic texts... sad thought. In my notes, I see I had intended to work on it and turn it into a sonnet. (I wrote... 'A sonnet?'') In actual fact, I have only written one sonnet in my life--and that is a very loose and sad excuse for a sonnet... Anyway, I'm typing up the brainstorm here with the line breaks (and a bit of tweaking here and there) as they were in the ms margin, minus a few way too over the top phrases. (ok, I keep coming back and editing this... so it is not as rough as it was when I first wrote this post...):
Look down
as you slant into the sky
and see the slow fall
of the hills, the red ants
of cars travelling black
trails through hazy hills.
The earth becomes vague
as if seen through silk.
And above, the sky arcs
blue, edges hemmed in white.
Once they looked up
longing, into that blue, where
hawks flew--trapped onto
the brown earth, hemmed in
by boulders and clustered clay
walls. Only dreamers thought
to fly. And perhaps for them
it was better than this sealed smooth air,
those who dared to melt at the sun
feel the ocean spray on their feet
before sinking into the sea
that was, for a while, endless.
Image credit: Roger Dean, "Flights of Icarus," in the Guardian
y) stacked and stuck at random into my bookcases along with the books. I come across an old folder of stories, and what seems to have been the beginning brainstorm for a poem, written in the margin of some torn manuscript printout I had been editing. I used to write so much--and so much like this. Why don't I write like this anymore? Even if it was a bit flowery and occasionally cliched, it had more passion in it than I can muster up these days. I wonder if all my passion has gone into academic texts... sad thought. In my notes, I see I had intended to work on it and turn it into a sonnet. (I wrote... 'A sonnet?'') In actual fact, I have only written one sonnet in my life--and that is a very loose and sad excuse for a sonnet... Anyway, I'm typing up the brainstorm here with the line breaks (and a bit of tweaking here and there) as they were in the ms margin, minus a few way too over the top phrases. (ok, I keep coming back and editing this... so it is not as rough as it was when I first wrote this post...):Look down
as you slant into the sky
and see the slow fall
of the hills, the red ants
of cars travelling black
trails through hazy hills.
The earth becomes vague
as if seen through silk.
And above, the sky arcs
blue, edges hemmed in white.
Once they looked up
longing, into that blue, where
hawks flew--trapped onto
the brown earth, hemmed in
by boulders and clustered clay
walls. Only dreamers thought
to fly. And perhaps for them
it was better than this sealed smooth air,
those who dared to melt at the sun
feel the ocean spray on their feet
before sinking into the sea
that was, for a while, endless.
Image credit: Roger Dean, "Flights of Icarus," in the Guardian
Friday, January 26, 2007
"Night Encounter" by Ken Saro-Wiwa
Night Encounter
Coming up the stairs
Through the light drizzle
One dark night, I met him
One with the darkness
I stopped for a moment,
Frightened, tense.
He laughed gently and I relaxed
Happy to find
In spite of the gun
He was still a man
It lit the dark
that gentle laugh
In the pitch of night...
But it was only the low laugh
Of one who was soon to die.
By Ken Saro-Wiwa
From Songs in a Time of War
from the ANA website
Coming up the stairs
Through the light drizzle
One dark night, I met him
One with the darkness
I stopped for a moment,
Frightened, tense.
He laughed gently and I relaxed
Happy to find
In spite of the gun
He was still a man
It lit the dark
that gentle laugh
In the pitch of night...
But it was only the low laugh
Of one who was soon to die.
By Ken Saro-Wiwa
From Songs in a Time of War
from the ANA website
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