#19 – On Rumi's poetry
A Rumi poem for your day
Hi friends! I hope your May is going well! To be honest, I haven’t had much time to read or write lately. I recently moved (still in Toronto), and it’s been taking me longer to settle in than I anticipated.
Still, I thought I would pop in here and share with you this excerpt from one of Rumi’s poems which has been coming back to me. (Rumi is the permanent poet-in-residence of my heart.)
A single brushstroke down
By Jalaluddin Rumi
Translated by Coleman Barks
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 lightning,
angry at war, quiet with gratitude, we are nothing
in this many-mooded world of weather
but a single brushstroke down,
speaking of presence.
Ah, Rumi! What divine magic! I feel so blessed to be able to get a taste of this poetry through Coleman Barks and other Rumi scholars. (I once wrote a thank-you note to Barks, and he responded graciously.)
Thank you for being here. Wishing you a wonderful week ahead!
PS: There was a Rumi exhibition at the Aga Khan museum in Toronto last year, and I happily spent hours there. Outside of the museum, there was this beautiful rendering on water of one of Rumi’s lines – “There is a voice that does not use words.” Picture below.
