HAFIZ
-- A MYSTIC PATH
Yes,
the verse of Rumi and Attar
insists
our one desire is finding love,
what
happens when the soul awakes: a star
is
born and moonlight floods our every move.
God
delights you tried to be a saint.
That
terror, like the ocean's undertow,
the
diving deep in God where others faint,
let
you meet the Friend whose name you know,
erasing
fear. Such laughter sounds like lightning,
finds
your heart in no protected place.
Darkness
in the mind and limbs is brightening,
when
broken clouds reveal the longed-for Face.
Life's
profoundly useless riddles show
Hafiz the way to paths the heart must go.
LITTLE
BUDDHA
The
little stone Buddha
sits
meditatively
waist-high
in maple leaves.
The
body is a tree.
His
head is capped
with
snail-like curls
as
wisdom extends
the
skull's soft top.
Half-closed
eyes
take
one look at a time
and
then let each go.
Parted
lips smile
as
if knowing something
like
Mona Lisa,
reflected
in the red line
of
the morning horizon
the
image takes in
forever facing East.
MEALS
IN SILENT MEDITATION
we
dine in silence
facing
windows, without words
nature
speaks volumes
keep
silence with friends
allow
God some quiet days
and
then eternity
even
while eating
is a
chance to be present
chewing
silence slowly
a
self-serve supper tray --
toasted-cheese
sandwich and soup,
while
grace is the side dish
monks
knead and bake the bread
a
sign in the kitchen claims
as we bring the stones for soup
SADHU
I
sit within the burning ground --
clothed in
cloudless sky --
both
hell and paradise are here.
At
night the pale, anaemic moon
whitewashes all
my limbs,
as
if ashes cooling from the pyre.
Death
remains so close at hand.
Others
contemplate it as if distant
while
the heat of curiosity is calling.
This
dying animal that lives in me
is
like a painted still life posed,
imitating
nature's slow decay of life.
Beside
me death awaits in silence,
the
way someone who hurt you
remains
the one you love and want.
In
that place a thousand deaths
have
stopped my breath in ecstasy.
This
pointless pain becomes a folding star.
But
do not speak. Say only nothing --
in
this incinerated heart I feel
that purest conflagration turn to beauty.
RUMI AND THE CAGED POEMS
It took a prophet or a friend of God
for us to find truth in a poet's
book of heroic couplets.
And a translator's mentor,
comparing an older version,
demanded: "Release them
from their cages." Do it.
Do not hesitate a blink,
like those who failed to loose
the tiger in the Baghdad zoo.
The poems behind iron bars,
like young men naked
in piles while wearing collars
and dog leashes in photos,
had their eyes blacked out
to keep them anonymous
(as if no one knew them
by their familiar bodies).
But can we at last get rid
of cages? Is there something
in us that longs to grab
the close assembly of bars,
themselves an enchanted world
alive with minerals uttering
a brilliant language to us
or the scent of jasmine blossoms
in a terrain of more value
than we could ever guess?
"Give up the forms," we hear.
Limiting forms and all forms
unbounded, beyond place.
From the shell of our body
we will emerge, sliding
in a creature's silken mucus,
out of the calcified shell
we still haul on our backs.
So the cage, the empty cage,
is where you can find me.
Royal Rhodes is a retired educator who taught courses in global religions for
almost forty years. His work has appeared recently in two poetry and art
collaborations with artist Claudia Esslinger: Specimens and Reflections,
and Shadows and Imaginings. He has been twice-nominated for this year's
Pushcart prize.
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