Peoples Geography — Reclaiming space

Creating people's geographies

Rumi-nations III

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,

there is a field. I’ll meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass,

the world is too full to talk about.

Ideas, language, even the phrase each other

doesn’t make any sense.

***

Late, by myself, in the boat of myself,

no light and no land anywhere,

cloudcover thick. I try to stay

just above the surface,

yet I’m already under

and living with the ocean.

***

The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you.

Don’t go back to sleep.

You must ask for what you really want.

Don’t go back to sleep.

People are going back and forth across the doorsill

where the two worlds touch.

The door is round and open.

Don’t go back to sleep.

***

The minute I heard my first love story,
I started looking for you, not knowing
how blind that was.

Lovers don’t finally meet somewhere,
they’re in each other all along.

Translations are from the books, The Essential Rumi by Coleman Barks with John Moyne, The Glance by Coleman Barks, and Soul of Rumi by Coleman Barks.

2 comments on “Rumi-nations III

  1. servant
    8 February, 2007

    I have always had a very hard time understanding the phrase each other. Is there anyone here besides you and me? An illusion stands between us. Something imagined. Something with no reality. Something other.

  2. peoplesgeography
    8 February, 2007

    You’re in fine company. That reality is an illusion, and that separation is an illusion, are precepts in quantum mechanics as well as ancient spiritual truths. Hmmmmmmm

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This entry was posted on 6 February, 2007 by in Empire, War and Terror, Poetry.

Timely Reminders

"Those who crusade, not for God in themselves, but against the devil in others, never succeed in making the world better, but leave it either as it was, or sometimes perceptibly worse than what it was, before the crusade began. By thinking primarily of evil we tend, however excellent our intentions, to create occasions for evil to manifest itself."
-- Aldous Huxley

"The only war that matters is the war against the imagination. All others are subsumed by it."
-- Diane DiPrima, "Rant", from Pieces of a Song.

"It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there"
-- William Carlos Williams, "Asphodel, That Greeny Flower"


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