Rumi

do you still

Stir sugar in your Cup

when Empty or Dissolving

drink Now,

Rumi is drunk

I was going to tell you my story

But waves of pain drowned my voice.

I tried to utter a word but my thoughts

Became fragile and shattered like glass.

Even the largest ship can capsize

In the stormy sea of love,

Let alone my feeble boat

Which shattered to pieces leaving me nothing

But a strip of wood to hold on to.

Small and helpless, rising to heaven

On one wave of love and falling with the next

I don’t even know if I am or I am not.

When I think I am,

I find myself worthless,

When I think I am not,

I find my value.

Like my thoughts,

I die and rise again each day

So how can I doubt the resurrection?

Tired of hunting for love in this world,

At last I surrender in the valley of love

And become free.

Inside the Great Mystery that is,

we don't really own anything.

What is this competition we feel then,

before we go, one at a time,

through the same gate?

None But The Lonely Heart

Goethe's German original:

Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt
Weiß, was ich leide!
Allein und abgetrennt
Von aller Freude,
Seh ich ans Firmament
Nach jener Seite.
Ach! der mich liebt und kennt,
Ist in der Weite.
Es schwindelt mir, es brennt
Mein Eingeweide.
Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt
Weiß, was ich leide!

An anonymous English translation:

Only one who knows loneliness
can understand my suffering and how I am tormented.
I look into the distance... I have no strength, my eyes grow dim...
He who knew and loved me is far away!
Only one who knows loneliness
can understand my suffering and how I am tormented.
My heart is burning...
One who knows loneliness
can understand my suffering and how I am tormented.
NONE BUT THE LONELY HEART
Pyotr Tchaikovsky(based on a poem by J.W. von Goethe)


None but the lonely heart
Can know my sadness
Alone and parted
Far from joy and gladness
Heaven's boundless arch I see
Spread about above me
O what a distance dear to one
Who loves me
None but the lonely heart
Can know my sadness
Alone and parted
Far from joy and gladness
Alone and parted far
From joy and gladness
My senses fail
A burning fire
Devours me
None but the lonely heart
Can know my sadness!!!

From: ‘Cien sonetos de amor’-Pablo Neruda

And this word, this paper written

by the thousand hands of a single hand
does not rest in you, does not serve for dreams.
It falls to the earth: there it continues.

No matter that light or praise
were spilled and rose from the glass
if they were a tenacious tremor of wine,
if your mouth was dyed amaranthine.

It no longer needs the lagging syllable
that which the reef brings and withdraws
from my memories, the incensed spume,

It no longer needs a single thing but to write your name.
And even though my sombre love silences it
much later the spring will speak it.

Paul Éluard

Would you see
The dark form of the sun
The contours of life
Or be truly dazzled
By the fire that fuses all
The flame conveyer of modesties
In flesh in gold that fine gesture

Error is as unknown
As the limits of spring
The temptation prodigious
All touches all travels you
At first it was only a thunder of incense
Which you love the more
The fine praise at four
Lovely motionless nude
Violin mute but palpable
I speak to you of seeing

I will speak to you of your eyes
Be faceless if you wish
Of their unwilling colour
Of luminous stones
Colourless
Before the man you conquer
His blind enthusiasm
Reigns naively like a spring
In the desert
Between the sands of night and the waves of day
Between earth and water
No ripple to erase
No road possible

Between your eyes and the images I see there
Is all of which I think
Myself inderacinable
Like a plant which masses itself
Which simulates rock among other rocks
That I carry for certain
You all entire
All that you gaze at
All

This is a boat
That sails a sweet river
It carries playful women
And patient grain
This is a horse descending the hill
Or perhaps a flame rising
A great barefooted laugh in a wretched heart
An autumn height of soothing verdure
A bird that persists in folding its wings in its nest
A morning that scatters the reddened light
To waken the fields
This is a parasol
And this the dress
Of a lace-maker more seductive than a bouquet
Of the bell-sounds of the rainbow
This thwarts immensity
This has never enough space
Welcome is always elsewhere
With the lightning and the flood
That accompany it
Of medusas and fires
Marvellously obliging
They destroy the scaffolding
Topped by a sad coloured flag
A bounded star
Whose fingers are paralysed

I speak of seeing you
I know you living
All exists all is visible
There is no fleck of night in your eyes

I see by a light exclusively yours.

Rumi

Listen to the living walls.

Whose silence are you?

i set the paper aside.

break my pen.

name myself silence.

go insane

go mad

burn like a candlemoth

arrive ahead of yourself.

you ask me

who are you

and with such a shaky existence

how can you fall in love.

Paul Celan

Silence, like Gold cooked in
charred
Hands.

Vast, grey,
near as all that is Lost
Sisterly-Shape:

All the Names, all the with-
Burnt up
Names. So much
Ash to be blessed. So much
Land gained
above
the light, so light
Soul-
Rings.

Vast. Grey. Clinker-
less.

You, then.
You with the pale
bitten-out bud,
You in the Wine-Flood.

(Did it not discharge
us too, this Hour?
Good,
Good, that your Word died away here.)
Silence, like Gold cooked, in
charred, charred
Hands.
Fingers, smoke-thin. Like Crowns, Air-Crowns
around – –

Vast. Grey. Track-
less.
Queen-
like.

Walt Whitman

O living always, always dying!

O the burials of me past and present,

O me while I stride ahead, material, visible, imperious as ever;

O me, what I was for years, now dead,

(I lament not, I am content;)

O to disengage myself from those corpses of me,

which I turn and look at where I cast them,

To pass on,

(O living! always living!)

and leave the corpses behind.