Seems like a good day to talk about peace.
FOLDED INTO THE RIVER
—Rumi
Your face is the light in here that makes
my arms full of gentleness.
The beginning of a month-long holiday, the disc
of the full moon, the shade of your hair,
these draw me in. I dive
into the deep pool of a mountain river,
folded into union,
as the split-second when the bat meets the ball,
and there is one cry between us.
__________________________
THE DRUNK AND THE MADMAN
—Rumi
I'm lost in your face, in your lost eyes.
The drunk and the madman inside me
take a liking to each other. They sit down
on the ground together. Look at this mess
of a life as the sun looks fondly into ruins.
With one glance many trees grow from a single seed.
Your two eyes are like a Turk born in Persia.
He's on a rampage, a Persian shooting Turkish arrows.
He has ransacked my house so that no lives here anymore,
just a boy running barefooted all through it.
Your face is a garden that comes up where the house was.
With our hands we tear down houses and make bare places.
The moon has no desire to be described.
No one needs this poetry.
The loose hair-strands of a beautiful woman
don't have to be combed.
_________________________
Lately I've been reading Rumi, and ironically enough, his work was mentioned in two ways at James Lee Jobe's reading in Davis last Friday night. James bookended his own poems with Rumi, front and back, and another gentleman (whose name escapes me) artfully recited another Rumi poem during the Open Mic. This gentleman also mentioned that a videotape featuring Rumi, read by Robert Bly, Rumi-expert Coleman Barks and others, will be shown at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Davis at 3 pm on Saturday, Sept. 17.
All you need to know to "get" Rumi is that the pronouns are interchangeable. You is I is we is God is your own spiritual self is a barefoot boy is a lover is a flyspeck. He believed we were all things and constantly transforming, and he found great joy in this. This poem sums it up:
UNMARKED BOXES
—Rumi
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 any one fearful.
Hear what's behind what I say.
Tatatumtum tatum tatadum.
There's the light gold of wheat in the sunh
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.
_______________________________
A few Rumi "quatrains":
(1127)
I drink streamwater and the air
becomes clearer and everything I do.
I become a waterwheel,
turning and tasting you, as long
as water moves.
(914)
Come to the orchard in Spring.
There is light and wine, and sweethearts in the pomegranate flowers.
If you do not come, these do not matter.
If you do come, these do not matter.
(82)
Today, like every other day, we wake up empty
and frightened. Don't open the door to the study
and begin reading. Take down a musical instrument.
Let the beauty we love be what we do.
There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.
_____________________________
Seems like a very good day to talk about peace. Yesterday's war poem inspired Steve Williams:
WHAT PEACE FEELS LIKE
—Steve Williams, Portland, OR
Motionless anaconda digests
capybara for months.
Marine returns to his wife,
he has killed no enemy.
Touch green leaf’s image in pond,
feel autumn’s orange rake.
Gray whale shepherds her little one,
listens for Orca song.
___________________________
Thanks, Steve!
—Medusa (who regrets that there are no Snakes in The Book Collector yet. Shoot for Wednesday.)
Medusa encourages poets of all ilk and ages to send their poetry and announcements of Northern California poetry events to kathykieth@hotmail.com for posting on this daily Snake blog. Rights remain with the poets.