My fingers are branches with hanging ripe apples.
My eyes are windows through which others snoop on my
soul that is kneaded with clouds.
My head is a camel hump with which I tap on a drum
that is made of the skin of time. I tap out the melody of my unity with the desert that stretches across my back.
My mouth is a well dried out by silence. Words are
empty caskets, or dry coffins. I mean, words are shells crushed under the feet
of the absolute.
My mind is but mirror of my face. I roam in
my mind.
Me is the one and only being under my
clothes. But you, Rumi, are pledged to the beyond who you assume is immanent in
the stone and the sea.
Don’t you know that stone is a mere solid
block formed of dry sand? With this stone I can smash the face of the everlasting
illusion which you carry in your head.
Rumi draws a circle like the shamas,
the sun, with his Sufi robe, as he spins like a puppet hanging from a thread
manipulated by Shams al-Din Tabrizi*.
I soar up deeply! The glinting light within me does
not resemble anything other than me. I have nothing but fingers that burst with
sense of touch. The taste of universe sticks to my fingers.
When my limbs melt in the mixture of: rose + sky +
river + giraffe, I become lighter than a tear and heavier than my days.
Very light, to soar around the globe.
Very heavy, with science.
Rumi, your purity is not
perfection, for it relies on the other.
Perfect
purity does not hang from a thread; it must stand by itself, for itself.
When I drink the rain and touch
the sand, the bird carries me away. I turn off the lights of the city so to
listen to the cracking of the seed-coat. The seed grows stems and roots and
fruit that falls on the scientist’s head.
But
if the seed is planted in a graveyard, the roots will be the hair of corpses;
the stems will be vertebrae; the branches will be bony fingers; there will be
no fruit.
-----------------------------
*
Shams al-Din Tabrizi (1185–1248) was
a Persian poet and intimate friend of Rumi.
This poem was edited by the Canadian poet, Erin Mouré
