When I am with you, we stay up all night.
When you’re not here, I can’t go to sleep.
Praise God for these two insomnias!
And the difference between them.
translated by Robert Bly
13th Century Persian poetry
from Love and Silence by Rumi
Awe resembles the bird that makes you quiet.
Awe and wonder put a lid on the kettle as soon as your love inside is boiling.
translated by Robert Bly
The Instruments by Rumi
Who is the luckiest in this whole orchestra? The reed.
Its mouth touches your lips to learn music.
All reeds, sugarcane especially, think only
of this chance. They sway in the canebrakes,
free in the many ways they dance.
Without you the instruments would die.
One sits close beside you. Another takes a long kiss.
The tambourine begs, Touch my skin so I can be myself.
Let me feel you enter each limb bone by bone,
that what died last night can be whole today.
Why live some soberer way, and feel you ebbing out?
I won’t do it.
Either give me enough wine or leave me alone,
now that I know how it is
to be with you in a constant conversation.
translated by Coleman Barks
Who makes these changes? by Rumi
Who makes these changes?
I shoot an arrow right.
It lands left.
I ride after a deer and find myself
chased by a hog.
I plot to get what I want
and end up in prison.
I dig pits to trap others
and fall in.
I should be suspicious
of what I want.
translated by Coleman Barks
from Eating Poetry by Rumi
Where a poem belongs is here, in the warmth of the chest;
Out in the world it dies of cold.
translated by Robert Bly
from Night and Sleep by Rumi
The spirit sees astounding beings, turtles turned to men,
Men turned to angels, when sleep erases the banal.
I think one could say the spirit goes back to its old home;
It no longer remembers where it lives, and loses its fatigue.
It carries around in life so many griefs and loads
And trembles under their weight; they are gone, it is all well.
translated by Robert Bly
From That Journeys Are Good by Rumi
You know every fruit grows more handsome in the light of the sun.
translated by Robert Bly
The Jar with the Dry Rim by Rumi
The mind is an ocean. . .and so many worlds
Are rolling there, mysterious, dimly seen!
And our bodies? Our body is a cup, floating
On the ocean; soon it will fill, and sink. . .
Not even one bubble will show where it went down.
The spirit is so near that you can’t see it!
But reach for it. . .Don’t be a jar
Full of water, whose rim is always dry.
Don’t be the rider who gallops all night
And never sees the horse that is beneath him.
translated by Robert Bly
Come to the orchard in Spring by Rumi
Come to the orchard in Spring.
There is light and wine, and sweethearts in the pomegranate flowers.
If you do not come, these do not matter.
If you do come, these do not matter.
translated by Coleman Barks
on dancing from Rumi
Dance, when you’re broken open.
Dance, if you’ve torn the bandage off.
Dance in the middle of the fighting.
Dance in your blood.
Dance, when you’re perfectly free.
translated by Coleman Barks with John Moyne
Leonard Durso 