You stop to point at the moon in the sky,
but the finger’s blind unless the moon is shining.
One moon, one careless finger pointing –
are these two things or one?
The question is a pointer guiding
a novice from ignorance thick as fog.
Look deeper. The mystery calls and calls:
No moon, no finger — nothing there at all.
- Taigu Ryokan
What could have caused your grip to weaken
that allowed creation to be?
How could a lover fall to his death
from the arms of infinite
strength?
How active you are in the mind sustaining such a great wall
that the sun can cast a frightening shadow
the world believes.
No one has ever really known sadness. No real God
would ever allow pain.
How then can a heart feel it is broken and in need
if we are held in the arms of infinite
compassion and
strength?
That mirror you (God) stand before –
we need to gaze into it also.
That name you called Beloved
as I fell from your lips –
I suffer
because I did not quite
hear it;
so tell me again dear One
so clear:
I am
you.
- Hafiz
Version: Daniel Ladinsky
from Love Poems from God: Twelve Sacred Voices from the East and West, Translated by Daniel Ladinsky
The night is black and the forest has no end;
a million people thread it in a million ways.
We have trysts to keep in the darkness, but where
or with whom – of that we are unaware.
But we have this faith – that a lifetime’s bliss
will appear any minute, with a smile upon its lips.
Scents, touches, sounds, snatches of songs
brush us, pass us, give us delightful shocks.
Then peradventure there’s a flash of lightning:
whomever I see that instant I fall in love with.
I call that person and cry: `This life is blest!
for your sake such miles have I traversed!’
All those others who came close and moved off
in the darkness – I don’t know if they exist or not.
- Tagore
No one can tell me,
Nobody knows,
Where the wind comes from,
Where the wind goes.
It’s flying from somewhere
As fast as it can,
I couldn’t keep up with it,
Not if I ran.
But if I stopped holding
The string of my kite,
It would blow with the wind
For a day and a night.
And then when I found it,
Wherever it blew,
I should know that the wind
Had been going there too.
So then I could tell them
Where the wind goes…
But where the wind comes from
Nobody knows.
- A.A. Milne
Forever nameless
Forever unknown
Forever unconceived
Forever unrepresented
yet forever felt in the soul.
By: D.H.Lawrence
At Tauba’s death I swore
I would not cry
I swore by Him who turns the spheres.
If a man has not lived shamefully,
there is no shame in dying.
No person, however safe in life, escapes
the tomb.
Only time is immortal.
No life is favored,
nor corpse reborn.
Every youth passes through destruction
to Allah.
All my dear friends, though eager to live long
depart in disorder
while spheres spin around them.
I swear I won’t stop crying for you
while one dove on a branch mourns
or birds fly.
By: Laila Akhyaliyya (646-704)
The moon shines in my body, but my blind eyes cannot see it:
The moon is within me, and so is the sun.
The unstruck drum of Eternity is sounded within me; but my deaf ears cannot hear it.
So long as man clamours for the “I” and the “Mine”, his works are as naught:
When all love of the “I” and the “Mine” is dead, then the work of the Lord is done.
For work has no other aim than the getting of knowledge:
When that comes, then work is put away.
The flower blooms for the fruit: when the fruit comes, the flower withers.
The musk is in the deer, but it seeks it not within itself: it wanders in quest of grass.
By: Kabir
From: Songs Of Kabir
Translated by Rabindranath Tagore
I was passionate,
filled with longing,
I searched
far and wide.
But the day
that the Truthful One
found me,
I was at home.
- Lalla Ded
If I speak in the tongues of men and angels,
but have not love,
I have become sounding brass or a tinkling symbol.
And if I have prophecy and know all mysteries and all knowledge,
and if I have all faith so as to remove mountains,
but have not love, I am nothing.
And if I dole out all my goods, and
if I deliver my body that I may boast
but have not love, nothing I am profited.
Love is long suffering,
love is kind,
it is not jealous,
love does not boast,
it is not inflated.
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