Sufi Poetry: "Inner Wakefulness" by Rumi

[ysabetwordsmith]

Sufism is a mystic branch of Islam. It focuses on surrender to the divine and on ecstatic awareness of the numinous layers of reality. You can see right away how that lends itself to great poetry, and indeed, this tradition has produced a lot of famous poets and beautiful poems. It also has wonders in dancing, music, calligraphy, painting, and other arts.

Among the masters of Sufi poetry is Rumi, whose full name appears in multiple different forms. He wrote a great deal of poetry about love, divinity, and the relationship between the two. He saw the sacred in everything, and everything revealed something sacred to him. His poetry is an intoxicating swirl of perception and consciousness. He uses luscious words and concrete metaphors to take ephemeral experiences and root them in the material world so people can understand them. This is a wonderful example of one of poetry's best tricks: bending language to make it describe the indescribable.

"Inner Wakefulness"
by Rumi

This place is a dream
only a sleeper considers it real
then death comes like dawn
and you wake up laughing
at what you thought
was your grief

A man goes to sleep in the town
where he has always lived
and he dreams
he's living in another town
in the dream he doesn't remember
the town he's sleeping in his bed in
he believes the reality
of the dream town
the world is that kind of sleep

Humankind is being led
along an evolving course,
through this migration
of intelligences
and though we seem
to be sleeping
there is an inner wakefulness,
that directs the dream
and that will eventually
startle us back
to the truth of
who we are

Sufi Poetry: "A Love Like That" by Elizabeth Barrette

[ysabetwordsmith]

As you can see in the previous post, Rumi is one of my favorite poets. His ecstatic awareness tends to color my desert poetry. I have a fantasy setting, the Whispering Sands desert, that uses some Middle Eastern motifs. The poetry for that setting has a very Sufi flavor, although the underlying cosmology isn't all the same. This poem originally appeared in Emerging Visions.

A Love Like That
by Elizabeth Barrette

The rain falls on thirsty ground,
And the clouds do not ask for their water back.

The shadow stretches across the sand,
And the grove does not ask for its shade back.

The tide climbs up the empty beach,
And the sea does not ask for its salt back.

The wind roves over the open dunes,
And the air does not ask for its breath back.

The stars shine in the endless sky,
And the night does not ask for its light back.

The sand pours through the glass,
And the day does not ask for its hours back.

Imagine a love like that, and you will begin
To understand how God thinks of you.