
Love came and broke my regret as if it were a bottle.
How can we escape
Love’s constant breaking and repairing?
Who can repair a broken bottle except Love?
Rubailer (2016), Rubai #3, page 112.

The soul’s Sultan pushes us from one play to another
as if we were pawns in a chess game.
I wonder if He wins. I wonder if He is ever checkmated.
After all, aren’t we the ones on trial?
He picked up our particles, gathered them together,
then kneaded them with the universe to make a paste.
He pierced our noses and inserted reins made of greed and lust
in order to pull us around the world like camels.
Who are we?
He put an oxen’s bell on the neck of the sky
and keeps crushing us under that sky as if we were sesame.
How lucky is that camel who has been tied by the halter of God’s Love.
He makes us drunk and excited while we are among the other camels.
Divan-i Kebir, Volume 15, Ghazal 6, verses 48-52, page 11.

Look at these fragments of soul
which have been chipped off, sparkling in this valley.
Watch this sea. Watch these ships
as they collide with each other. Continue reading “No Place for Water and Earth (12/29/19)”

Clean souls ascend to the sky.
Turbid souls descend to the valley, are buried in the ground.
Open the eye of your soul and look at souls.
How did they get here?
What happens to them?
Where and how do they go? Continue reading “Look at Souls (10/6/19)”

Every moment, Your kindness follows after sorrow.
If this were not so, no one could stand this suffering.
Make me constantly drunk with the wine which gives no hangover.
I don’t want any other wine. Continue reading “The Only Way to Reach Eternity (9/22/19)”

He said, “I am the fire which burns you.”
I answered, “Yes, but Your Love and Your sun are in my heart.
“If I smell one rose without Your Love,
burn me right away like a thorn.” Continue reading “I Have No Constancy, No Peace (6/30/19)”

My Beloved whose scattered hair makes everyone confused,
whose sweet ruby lips scatter sugar and honey,
that Beloved asked me, “Are you sorry about our separation?”
I answered, “O my soul, so much so that all the world’s sorrows are in that sorry.”
Rubailer (2016), Rubai #3, page 33.

O one who holds the halter of time,
O one who opens the door of the paradise of meanings!
Your divinity is what makes everything appear and scatter.
Your world of appearances is the ladder of wishes. Continue reading “Don’t Talk So Much (6/2/19)”