We have been moving things around in the house to accommodate the dismantling of some of our floors, and the noisy fans that are supposed to go for twenty four hours. I struggle with and in the noise and at the moment they are unplugged - a temporary reprieve. However, in the shuffling, I found a book of Rumi poems given to me by a friend a few years before she died (as much of any of us die). Her memory often surfaces, and at times I hear her laughter as I mutter a lament about some matter that eventually reveals itself as being surprisingly trivial. My laughter joins hers as it always has. It is a good thing to hold this book,A Year with Rumi by Coleman Barks, and I give thanks for all the ways we humans are connected. As intangible as poetry is, its strength is enough to hold us securely in love.
A Single Brushstroke Down
Light dawns, and any talk of proof
resembles a blind man's cane at sunrise.
Remember the passage,
We are with you wherever you are.
Come back to that.
When did we ever leave it?
No matter we're in a prison of forgetting
or enjoying the banquet of wisdom,
we are always inside presence.
Drunkenly asleep, tenderly awake,
clouded with grief, laughing like lightening,
angry at war, quiet with gratitude, we are nothing
in this many-mooded world of weather
but a single brushstroke down,
speaking of presence.
Coleman Barks adds, "The word Allah in Arabic begins with strong downward mark."
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