Snow on the east side of Cleveland. Photograph taken and copyrighted 2013
Between the conscious and the unconscious, the mind
has put up a swing:
all earth creatures, even the supernovas, sway
between these two trees,
And it never winds down.
Angels, animals, humans, insects by the million, also
the wheeling sun and moon;
ages go by, and it goes on.
Everything is swinging: heaven, earth, water, fire,
and the secret one slowly growing a body.
Kabir saw that for fifteen seconds, and it made him a servant for life.”
—-Kabir
My religion is love
Hindu and Sufi ecstatic poetry is a special niche of poetry. Rumi, Kabir, Attar, all are famous and well loved even today in the twenty first century. They lived in the fifteenth century. That we can relate today is the surprise. Our souls recognize the familiar verses and they take the words right inside and leave them in the soul.
Kabir taunts the establishment. Robert Bly has had a tremendous influence on aesthetic poetry as a translator and editor. Coleman Barks has also worked hard editing and translating these poems into the understanding of western people in today’s world.
Kabir has interwoven Sufism with its confidence, secretive, desert meditation and Hindu which is more serious on the surface. Sufism has arisen utterly opposed to orthodoxy, and dances its way into our souls. It changes you and you never change back.
Have you heard the music that no fingers
enter into?
Far inside the house
entangled music—
What is the sense of leaving the house?
Suppose you scrub your ethical skin until it shines,
but inside there is no music,
then what?
Mohammed’s son pores over words, and points and this
this
and that,
but if his chest is not soaked dark with love,
then what?
The Yogi comes along in his famous orange.
But if inside he is colorless, then what?
Kabir says: Every instant that the sun is risen,
if I stand in the temple, or on a balcony,
in the hot flelds, or in a walled garden,
my own Lord is making love with me.”
—Kabir
Prayer beads
Dance with the ecstacy of the Beloved
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