"The Gift" (of Hafiz) Keeps Giving

 It's Sunday morning with it's quiet time, reflections and contemplations. And after some favorite Psalms, I was drawn back to another old source of insight and epiphany: The Gift*, a book of poems by Hafiz. As with other favorite books of poetry left unconsulted too long, it offered new understandings from poems I'd always liked, but also from some I'd spent less time with. From The Gift:


The Stairway of Existence

We

Are not

In pursuit of formalities

Or fake religious

Laws,

For through the staircase of existence

We have come to God's

Door.

We are

People who need to love, because

Love is the soul's life,

Love is simply creation's greatest joy.

Through

The staircase of existence,

O, through the staircase of existence, Hafiz,

Have

You now come,

Have all now come to

The Beloved's

Door.

Love is the Funeral Pyre

Love is

The funeral pyre

Where I have laid my living body.

All the false notions of myself

That once caused fear, pain,

Have turned to ash

As I neared God.

What has risen

From the tangled web of thought and sinew

Now shines with jubilation

Through the eyes of angels

And screams from the guts of

Infinite existence

Itself.

Love is the funeral pyre

Where the heart must lay

It's body.

In Need of the Breath

My heart

Is an unset jewel

Upon the tender night

Yearning for it's dear old Friend.

When the Nameless One debuts again

Ten thousand facets of being unfurl wings

And reveal such a radiance inside

I enter a realm divine...

My heart is an unset jewel

upon existence

Waiting for the Friend's touch.

Tonight

My heart is an unset ruby

Offered bowed and weeping to the Sky.

I am dying in these cold hours

For the resplendent glance of God.

I am dying

Because of a divine remembrance

Of who I really am.

Hafiz, tonight,

Your soul

Is a brilliant reed instrument

In need of the breath of

Christ.

The Heart is Right

The

Heart is right to cry

Even when the smallest drop of light,

Of love,

Is taken  away.

Perhaps you may kick, moan, scream

In a dignified

Silence,

But you are so right

To do so in any fashion

Until God returns

To You.

Startled By God

Not like

A lone beautiful bird,

These poems now rise in great white flocks

Against my mind's vast hills

Startled by God

Breaking a branch

When His foot

Touches earth

Near me.


*The Gift, Poems by Hafiz, the Great Sufi Master, as interpreted by Daniel Ladinsky (1999)