Sufi Poetry

This an interesting site with translations of Sufi poetry. Sufi poetry, in my experience, comes closest in words to portraying the experience of ecstatic love and union with the Divine. Although not unique to Sufism, I love the use of the lover/Beloved imagery to represent the mystic's longing for God. It's so powerful and moving. Here is a taste of Rumi from a translation by Coleman Barks. Really it's reworking of an AJ Arberry's translations, so maybe not so close to the original? I couldn’t say but it is still beautiful. But my favorite volume of Rumi has gone missing and this will give you an idea of it.

Spring paints the countryside.
Cypress trees grow even more beautiful,
but let's stay inside.
Lock the door.
Come to me naked.
No one's here.

If you read this poem as a mystic, it is sublime.

Tagore, St. John & the Artist

In my last post I talked about St. John of the Cross' poem and it's relationship to the artist. This Rabindranath Tagore poem says the same thing, but in a different way without all the Christian overtones. (God I wish I could read this in the original Bengali!)

If thou speakest not I will fill my heart with thy silence and
endure it. I will keep still and wait like the night with starry
vigil and its head bent low with patience.
The Morning will surely come, the darkness will vanish,
and thy voice pour down in golden streams breaking through
the sky.Then thy words will take wing in songs from every one of
my birds' nests, and thy melodies will break forth in flowers
in all my forest groves.

He's saying its the Divine creative source following through him that creates his art. It is his stillness and waiting that allows this. Just as St. John says that the pregnant Virgin will come, if you take her in. My favorite line is "I will fill my heart with thy silence and endure it." Being silent and still is not always so easy.

St. John of the Cross & the Artist

Of the Divine Word
Pregnant with the holy
Word will come the Virgin
Walking down the road
If you will take her in.

This beautiful poem is a road map for what a spiritual artist must do to hook into the flow of Divine creativity. The fundamentally creative nature of the Universe is represented here as the pregnant Virgin. Her pregnancy is physical creativity in potentiality. Her virginity is the state of her mind and soul; it has nothing to do with her sexuality. The pregnant Mary instructs us on how to make ourselves ready to receive the creative spirit. We must make ourselves as virgin ground, unstamped by the traumas & desires of life. We must be open and hold ourselves empty in order to be filled. St John reminds us that this is all that is necessary for the Divine to enter into us. It is the nature of the Divine to create, or as Plotinus would say, to emanate form. If we allow the Divine in, our own creative output is assured and, more importantly, sacred. It is the moment of creation, the intimacy an artist can feel with God that is the object. It is that union, which without effort, spontaneously produces the form which will be come a physical work of art. What's more, art that is produced in this way captures the resonance of that experience and can, on some level, transmit some of that energy to its viewer. This is the ideal that the spiritual artist must continually strive for.