More Rumi

Mountaintop Trough

We are here like profligates,
three camels with muzzles
plunged in provender.

Other camels rage
down below in the valley.
foaming, but they remain
with their lips stuck out,

to look at the mountain.
by just straining your neck
and you do not arrive here
is ours. It sustains and protects,
This windy mountaintop trough

You must start out and continue on.
You have to leave the place
where everyone worries about rank and money,
where dogs bark and stay home.

Up here it is music and poetry
and the divine wind.

Be the date tree that gave fruit
to Mary, the let-it-be of her heart.

Say a small poem.
Love the exchange.

An autumn willow has no fruit,
so how could it dance
in the wind of do-not-fear?

It rattles and talks
with nothing to offer.

Give voice to a poem.
Let it end with praise for the sun
and the friend within the sun.

A Beautiful Walk Inside You

Through this blood veil
the 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 marketplace
and begins haggling prices.
Love wonders away with other
business to transact, something
to do with incomparable beauty.

There are secret things happening.
Hallaj listens to whispers
and walks off the speaker's
platform onto a 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 what hurts
out of your loving's foot.

Then you will see gardens
with secluded rose bowers,
and they will all be inside you.

Shams is the sun
obscured by this cloud of words.

Maybe he will burn the overcast off
and let love clear and brighten.