Hafiz

GREAT POEMS

O Master, You are so gracious. After all these years You still
Remember who I am: the one who wears the dust of Your door like a crown.

Tell me, who taught You to be so generous to Your slaves?
Don't worry, I won't tell those spies who are watching Your every move.

O Holy Bird, please bless this path I'm on,
For I'm new to this traveling, and it's a long way I have to go.

O morning breeze, take my prayers to the Master,
And tell Him that each day I am on my knees at dawn.
I yearn for the day when I will leave this house and head out on the road.
When that day comes, friends will wonder where I've gone.

O give me the secret map to the place where I can drink wine with You,
For in that place only can I be drunk, and in my drunkenness be free.

Only great poems can capture the hearts of those who don't read;
So poets, sing! Let the God-of-Oceans fill your mouth with pearls.

O Hafiz, if you are seeking the pearl of union, do this:
From tears, make yourself an ocean and then dive!

Hafiz (1310-1369),Drunk on the Wine of the Beloved: Poems of Hafiz

Kabir: "The Time Before Death"

Friend, hope for the Guest while you are alive.
Jump into experience while you are alive!
Think... and think... while you are alive.
What you call "salvation" belongs to the time
before death.

If you don't break your ropes while you're alive,
do you think
ghosts will do it after?

The idea that the soul will rejoin with the ecstatic
just because the body is rotten--
that is all fantasy.
What is found now is found then.
If you find nothing now,
you will simply end up with an apartment in the
City of Death.

If you make love with the divine now, in the next
life you will have the face of satisfied desire.

So plunge into the truth, find out who the Teacher is,
Believe in the Great Sound!

Kabir says this: When the Guest is being searched for,
it is the intensity of the longing for the Guest that
does all the work.
Look at me, and you will see a slave of that intensity.

~Kabir, included in Ten Poems to Change Your Life

Robert Bly Reads Kabir

Without Brushing My Hair

The

Closer

I get to you, Beloved,

The more I can see

It is just You and I all alone

In this

World.

I hear

A knock at my door,

Who else could it be,

So I rush without brushing

My hair.

For too

Many nights

I have begged for Your

Return

And what

Is the use of vanity

At this late hour, at this divine season,

That has now come to my folded

Knees?

If your love letters are true dear God

I will surrender myself to

Who you keep saying

I

Am.

~ Hafiz, The Garden of Heaven: Poems of Hafiz (Dover Thrift Editions)

Know that the wheeling heavens are turned by waves of Love:
were it not for Love, the world would be frozen, stiff.
How would an inorganic thing transform into a plant?
How would living creatures sacrifice themselves
to become endowed with spirit?
How would the spirit sacrifice itself for the sake of that Breath
by which Mary was made pregnant?
Each one of them would be unyielding and immovable as ice:
how could they be flying and searching like locusts?
Every one is in love with that Perfection
and hastening upward like a sapling.
Their haste implicitly is saying, “Glory to God!”
They are purifying the body for the sake of the spirit.

Rumi, Sacred Poetry: Poems of Rumi, the Enlightened Heart, Poems of Kabir (Sacred Poetry)

Good People,

Most royal greening verdancy,
rooted in the sun,
you shine with radiant light.

In this circle of earthly existence
you shine
so finely,
it surpasses understanding.

God hugs you.
You are encircled
by the arms
of the mystery of God.

~Saint Hildegard of Bingen,
Meditations with Hildegard of Bingen (New Age Mystics)

God brings about occasions for turning its course towards Himself.
Thereafter God takes up such a life and guides and controls it
according to His supreme will, which works always for good.”

- Swami Ramdas
The Essential Swami Ramdas (Library of Perennial Philosophy)

The same stream of life that runs through my veins night and day, runs through the world and dances in rhythmic measure.

~ Rabindranath Tagore

The Heart of God: Prayers of Rabindranath Tagore

...the Truth reveals itself as divine intoxication.
No matter what is happening, you experience a high state.
Someone may be yelling at you, and you think, "Listen to that -
the glory of God!" In everything and everyone you experience
only intoxication, ecstasy.
Some people experience the answer as absolute enlightenment,
complete serenity.

~Gurumayi Chidvilasananda, p.4


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