Ecstasy. Longing. Words that can never quite express the truth. This is what Jalaluddin Rumi wrote about seven hundred years ago, in words that endure; regarded by many as a saint, he wrote tens of thousands of poems. Some of them are available in English for the first time in Open Secret/Versions of Rumi, just published by Threshhold Books (RD 3, Box 208, Putney, Vermont 05346; $7 paperback). It’s a beautiful book, the highest kind of inspired, and inspiring, writing.

These are collaborative translations. John Moyne, a Persian scholar and director of the linguistics program at the City University of New York, translates from the Persian of Rumi, and Coleman Barks, who teaches poetry at the University of Georgia, creates from them these “versions” — more accessible to modern Westerners than literal translations, yet faithful to the original.

Threshhold Books published another translation of Rumi, The Ruins of the Heart, in 1981.

Our thanks to Threshhold Books for permission to print these poems.

— Ed.

 

Someone Digging in the Ground
An eye is meant to see things.
The soul is here for its own joy.
A head has one use: For loving a true love.
Legs: To run after.

Love is for vanishing into the sky. The mind,
for learning what men have done and tried to do.
Mysteries are not to be solved. The eye goes blind
 when it only wants to see why.

A lover is always accused of something.
But when he finds his love, whatever was lost
in the looking comes back completely changed.
On the way to Mecca, many dangers: Thieves, 
the blowing sand, only camel’s milk to drink.
Still, each pilgrim kisses the black stone there
with pure longing, feeling in the surface
the taste of the lips he wants.

This talk is like stamping new coins. They pile up,
while the real work is done outside
by someone digging in the ground.
I Have Such a Teacher
Last night my teacher taught me the lesson of Poverty:
Having nothing and wanting nothing.

I am a naked man standing inside a mine of rubies, 
clothed in red silk.
I absorb the shining and now I see the ocean,
billions of simultaneous motions
moving in me.
A circle of lovely, quiet people
becomes the ring on my finger.

Then the wind and thunder of rain on the way. 
I have such a teacher.
82
Today, like every other day, we wake up empty
and frightened. Don’t open the door to the study
and begin reading. Take down the dulcimer.

Let the beauty we love be what we do. 
There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.
1652
We are the mirror as well as the face in it. 
We are tasting the taste this minute
of eternity. We are pain
and what cures pain, both. We are
the sweet, cold water and the jar that pours.
An Empty Garlic
You miss the garden, 
because you want a small fig from a random tree.
You don’t meet the beautiful woman.
You’re joking with an old crone.
It makes me want to cry how she detains you, 
stinking-mouthed, with a hundred talons, 
putting her head over the roofedge to call down, 
tasteless fig, fold over fold, empty
as dry-rotten garlic.

She has you tight by the belt,
even though there’s no flower and no milk 
inside her body.
Death will open your eyes
to what her face is: Leather spine
of a black lizard. No more advice.

Let yourself be silently drawn 
by the stronger pull of what you really love.
Say Yes Quickly
Forget your life. Say God is Great. Get up.
You think you know what time it is. It’s time to pray.
You’ve carved so many little figurines, too many.
Don’t knock on any random door like a beggar.
Reach your long hand out to another door, beyond where
you go on the street, the street
where everyone says, “How are you?”
and no one says How aren’t you?

Tomorrow you’ll see what you’ve broken and torn tonight,
thrashing in the dark. Inside you
there’s an artist you don’t know about.
He’s not interested in how things look different in moonlight.

If you are here unfaithfully with us,
you’re causing terrible damage.
If you’ve opened your loving to God’s love, 
you’re helping people you don’t know
and have never seen.

Is what I say true? Say yes quickly,
if you know, if you’ve known it
from before the beginning of the universe.
511
The clear bead at the center changes everything.
There are no edges to my loving now.

I’ve heard it said there’s a window that opens 
from one mind to another,

but if there’s no wall, there’s no need
for fitting the window, or the latch.
Those You Are With
What is a real connection between people? When the same knowledge
opens a door between them. When the same inner sight exists
in you as in another, you are drawn to be companions.
When a man feels in himself the inmost nature of a woman,
he is drawn to her sexually. When a woman
feels the masculine self of a man within her,
she wants him physically in her.

When you feel the qualities of Gabriel in you, you fly up quickly
like a fledgling not thinking of the ground.
When you feel asinine qualities in you, no matter how you try
to do otherwise, you will head toward the stable.

The mouse is not despicable for its form, which is a helpless victim 
to birds of prey, the mouse who loves dark places and cheese 
and pistachio nuts and syrup. When the white falcon, though,
has the inner nature of a mouse, it is a disgrace 
to all animals. Angelic figures and criminals 
shackled head-down in a pit are similar-looking, 
same arms, same head. Moses is a bright spirit, 
Pharaoh disgusting with his sorcery.

Always search for your innermost nature in those you are with.
As rose-oil imbibes from roses.
Even on the grave of a holy man, a holy man lays his face
and hands and takes in light.

© Copyright 1984, Threshhold Books