ysabetwordsmith: Cartoon of me in Wordsmith persona (Default)
[personal profile] ysabetwordsmith posting in [community profile] poetree
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

Date: 2012-05-16 12:34 am (UTC)
bookblather: A picture of Yomiko Readman looking at books with the text "bookgasm." (Default)
From: [personal profile] bookblather
Oh, wow, that ending-- it's Plato's Allegory of the Cave, but joyful, anticipatory. That's why I love Rumi, myself; he always writes with such joy.

Re: Yes...

Date: 2012-05-21 01:23 am (UTC)
bookblather: A picture of Yomiko Readman looking at books with the text "bookgasm." (Default)
From: [personal profile] bookblather
Yes. He embraces the world, arms wide open to anything and everything that it sends. I love it.

Date: 2012-05-16 03:54 am (UTC)
zirconium: photo of bell tower seen on a walk to the Acropolis (athens bell tower)
From: [personal profile] zirconium
A favorite round, based on a text by Rumi: Come, Come, Whoever You are

(There's a descant that's sometimes sung with it, with the phrase "Though you've broken your vows a thousand times.")

Date: 2012-05-27 02:13 pm (UTC)
From: [personal profile] lynnoconnacht
Oh, wow. That is really beautiful and the ending is incredibly powerful.

There's such... warmth to this and joy, as [personal profile] bookblather's already pointed out. ^-^

Profile

poetree: Paper sculpture of bulbuous tree made from strips of book pages (Default)
POETREE

February 2017

S M T W T F S
   1234
567891011
12131415161718
19202122232425
262728    

Most Popular Tags

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags
Page generated Jul. 24th, 2025 08:59 am
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios