If you want the truth, I’ll tell you the truth:
Listen to the secret sound, the real sound, which is inside you.
The one no one talks of speaks the secret sound to himself,
and he is the one who has made it all.
translated by Robert Bly
Indian poet
Breath by Kabir
Are you looking for me? I am in the next seat.
My shoulder is against yours.
You will not find me in stupas, not in Indian shrine rooms, nor in synagogues, nor in cathedrals:
not in masses, nor kirtans, not in legs winding around your own neck, nor in eating nothing but vegetables.
When you really look for me, you will see me instantly–
you will find me in the tiniest house of time.
Kabir says: Student, tell me, what is God?
He is the breath inside the breath.
translated by Robert Bly
from Music by Kabir
Kabir says: Every instant that the sun is risen,
if I stand in the temple, or on a balcony,
in the hot fields, or in a walled garden,
my own Lord is making love with me.
translated by Robert Bly
A Place To Sit by Kabir
Don’t go outside your house to see flowers.
My friend, don’t bother with that excursion.
Inside your body there are flowers.
One flower has a thousand petals.
That will do for a place to sit.
Sitting there you will have a glimpse of beauty
inside the body and out of it,
before gardens and after gardens.
translated by Robert Bly
from Why Should We Part? by Kabir
Here is Kabir”s idea: as the river gives itself into the ocean,
what is inside me moves inside you.
translated by Robert Bly
from The Boat by Kabir
How lucky Kabir is, that surrounded by all this joy
he sings inside his own little boat.
His poems amount to one soul meeting another.
These songs are about forgetting dying and loss.
They rise above both coming in and going out.
translated by Robert Bly
from What I said to the wanting-creature by Kabir
Kabir says this: just throw away all thoughts of imaginary things,
and stand firm in that which you are.
from The Message by Rabindranath Tagore
Evidently the only way to find the path is to set fire to my own life.
translated by Robert Bly
from Why Mira Can’t Go Back To Her Old House by Mirabai
. . .My teacher taught me this.
Approve me or disapprove me: I praise the Mountain Energy night and day.
I take the path that ecstatic human beings have taken for centuries.
I don’t steal money, I don’t hit anyone. What will you charge me with?
I have felt the swaying of the elephant’s shoulders; and now
you want me to climb on a jackass? Try to be serious.
translated by Robert Bly
from The Clay Cup by Ghalib
When a drop falls in the river, it becomes the river.
When a deed is done well, it becomes the future.
translated by Robert Bly
