from Heer - Waris Shah
Ever new, ever fresh is the Spring of Love!
Ever new, ever fresh is the Spring of Love!
When I learnt the lesson of love, My heart dreaded the sight of the mosque. I went into the temple, Where a thousand horns were blowing.
When I grasped the hint of love, I beat and drove out all senses of "I" and " You”, Both my heart and vision became clear. Now in whatsoever direction I look, I see only the lord.
I am tired of reading Vedas and Qur'ans; My forehead is worn by constant prostrations in the mosque. But the lord is neither at Hindu shrines nor at Mecca, Whoever found him, found him in the light of his own beauty.
Burn the prayer mat, break the bucket, And do not touch the beads or the staff. The lovers are proclaiming at the top of their voices, "Give up the lawful and eat carrion."
I have lived all my life in a mosque, But my heart is still full of dirt. I had never vowed for the prayer of unity of God Now why do I rave and cry.
Love has made me forget to prostrate myself before you, Now why do you quarrel with me in vain? Waris is doing his best to keep silent about it, But love says "Kill‑‑destroy all show and formality."
Inspite of not knowing Punjabi, Abida's rendition of Waris Shah's Heer is proving to be soothing to my sleepless sickness. I suppose this is the effect of Waris Shah's great masterpiece on someone as screwed up as me, as it attacks from all the directions leaping beyond the mere syntax of language or comprehension.
Big Book Of Poetry
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The Seed Market - Rumi
Can you find another market like this?
Where,
with your one rose
you can buy hundreds of rose gardens?
Where, for one seed you get a whole wilderness?
For one weak breath, the divine wind?
You've been fearful of being absorbed in the ground, or drawn up by the air.
Now your waterbead lets go and drops into the ocean, where it came from.
It no longer has the form it had, but it's still water. The essence is the same.
This giving up is not a repenting. It's a deep honoring of yourself.
When the ocean comes to you as a lover, marry, at once, quickly, for Allah's sake!
Don't postpone it! Existence has no better gift.
No amount of searching will find this.
A perfect falcon, for no reason, has landed on your shoulder, and become yours.
translated by Coleman Barks
Big Book Of Poetry
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Apartment in Leme - Elizabeth Bishop
1.
Off to the left, those islands, named and renamed so many times now everyone's forgotten their names, are sleeping.
Pale rods of light, the morning's implements, lie in among them tarnishing already, just like our knives and forks.
Because we live at your open mouth, oh Sea, with your cold breath blowing warm, your warm breath cold, like in the fairy tale.
Not only do you tarnish our knives and forks
- regularly the silver coffee-pot goes into dark, rainbow-edged eclipse;
the windows blur and mirrors are wet to touch. Custodia complains, and then you frizz her straightened, stiffened hair.
Sometimes you embolden, sometimes bore. You smell of codfish and old rain. Homesick, the salt weeps in the salt-cellars.
Breathe in. Breathe out. We're so accustomed to those sounds we only hear them in the night. Then they come closer
but you keep your distance.
It's growing lighter. On the beach two men get up from shallow, newspaper-lined graves. A third sleeps on. His coverlet
is corrugated paper, a flattened box. One running dog, two early bathers, stop dead in their tracks; detour.
Wisps of fresh green stick to your foaming lips like those on horses' lips. The sand's bestrewn: white lilies, broken stalks,
white candles with wet, blackened wicks, and green glass bottles for white alcohol meant for the goddess meant to come last night.
(But you've emptied them all.)
Perhaps she came, at that. It was so clear! And you were keeping quiet: roughened, greeny-black, scaly
as one of those corroded old bronze mirrors in all the world's museums (How did the ancients ever see anything in them?)
incapable of reflecting even the biggest stars. One cluster, bright, astringent as white currants, hung from the Magellanic Clouds
above you and the beach and its assorted lovers and worshippers, almost within their reach if they had noticed.
The candles flickered. Worshippers, in white, holding hands, singing, walked in to you waist-deep. The lovers lay in the sand, embraced.
Far out, saffron flares of five invisible fishing boats wobbled and hitched along, farther than the stars,
weaker, and older.
But for now the sun. Slowly, reluctantly, you're letting go of it; it slowly rises; metallic; two-dimensional.
You sigh, and sigh again. We live at your open mouth, with your cold breath blowing warm, your warm breath cold like in the fairy tale
no - the legend.
Big Book Of Poetry
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