A Beautiful Walk ...

"A Beautiful Walk Inside You"

Through this veil

A lover sees a beautiful walk.

Reason says, There are only six

directions: north, east, south, west,

up and down. There is no way

out of those limits.

Love says, but I have 

many times escaped.

Reason comes to a market place

and begins haggling prices.

Love wanders away with other

business to transact, something 

to do with incomparable beauty.

There are secret things happening. 

god listens to whispers

and walks off the speaker's platform 

onto the scaffold. 

Dreg-drinkers have love perceptions

that reasonable men fiercely deny.

They say, we cannot go barefooted

in that courtyard. There is nothing but 

thorns through there. 

Love answers, The thorns are inside you.

Be silent, and pull out what hurts

from your loving's foot.

Then you will see gardens

with secluded rose bowers,

and they will all be inside you.

Shams [best friend] is the sun

obscured by this cloud of words.

Maybe he will burn the overcast off

and let love clear and brighten. 

                                           -- Rumi 

Translated by Coleman Barks

(contributed by Tosh)

Who is this king - by Rumi

Who is this king

That forms another king out of the ground,

Who for the sake of two beggars

Makes himself a beggar?

Who is this with his hand out 

Saying, Please give just a little,

So I can give you a kingdom.

He heals. He enlivens.

He tells the water to boil

And the steam to fade into air.

He makes the dying world eternal

His greatest alchemy

Is how he undoes the binding

That keeps love from breathing deep.

He loosens the chest.

With no tool he fashions where we live.

Do not grieve for your rusty, iron heart.

He will polish it to a steel mirror.

And as you are being lowered into the ground,

Closed away from friends, don’t cry.

He turns the ants and the snakes 

Into beautiful new companions.

Every second he changes cruelty 

To a loyal friendship.

Remember the proverb:

Eat the grapes, do not keep talking about the garden,

Eat the grapes.

From a rough stone ledge 

Come a hundred marble fountains.

Out of unconditional emptiness

Comes this planet with all its qualities.

Lake water over there,

Out of one huge NO

Comes a chorus of yeses.

Rivers of light flow from human eyes,

And consider your ears, where language

Alchemizes into amber.

He gives the soul a house, 

Then another and another.

He descends into dirt

And makes it majesty.

Be silent now.

Say fewer and fewer praise poems.

Let yourself become living poetry. 

rumi