The Sun Never Says

Even

After

All this time

The sun never says to the earth,

"You owe

Me."

Look

What happens

With a love like that,

It lights the

Whole Sky.

-- Hafiz, (Khwāje Shams-od-Dīn Moḥammad Ḥāfeẓ-e), (1325-1390) the greatest of Persian poets and Sufi Muslim.

Power is Safest in the Poet's Hands

Power is safest in the poet's hands, thus for the poet

God will

pose.

The realms of thought, sublimely wild, the finest pigments of

ground suns, the violin's divine plea for a 

true friend;

what is all this world has seen from art: the shadow more true and

glorious there

than in the cage where there is often talk of right and wrong.

The reins of God say to his lover,

"Hold me in your mouth, dear,

as you toil with all your limbs and strength

to free the magnificence

in man."

The reins of the Sky sing,

"Grab hold, and you will know God

lowers His cup into you

to drink."

--Shams-ud-din Muhammad Hafiz (ca 1320-1389), Persian mystic poet, from Love Poems from God: Twelve Sacred Voices from the East and West, Daniel Ladinsky, ed.

The Second Jesus

O Lord, it’s me: blanked out in divine light
and become a horizon of rays flashing from the Essence.

My every atom yearned for vision
till I fell drunk on the manifestations of lordship.

Love polished the rust from my heart’s mirror
till I began to see the mysteries;

I emerged from the darkness of my existence
and became what I am (you know me) from the Light of Being:

blackened like charcoal dark soul’s smoke
but mixed with love fires and illumined.

Some say the path is difficult;
God forgive them! I went so easily:

The Holy Spirit breathes his every breath into Mo’in–
who knows? Maybe I’m the second Jesus.

--Gharib Nawaz (ca 1142- 1236), Persian Sufi poet and mystic, from The Drunken Universe: An Anthology of Persian Sufi Poetry