A 2013 Poetry Fantasy on Rumi’s 806th Birthday - by Aberjhani

Portrait of Jalal al-Din Rumi by Haydar Hatemi.

“We are the mirror as well as the face in it.We are tasting the taste this minuteof eternity. We are painand what cures pain, both. We arethe sweet cold water and the jar that pours.”--Jalal al-Din Rumi as interpreted by Coleman Barks in The Essential Rumi
War is an addiction to chaos that shreds human souls into tattered rags of trauma.  In acknowledgement of Rumi’s 806th birthday, I’m all for Syria, Al Qaeda, Al Shabaab, and all other countries and organizations at war with each other to exchange their guns and bombs for poems by Mevlana. Replace tanks and drones with open mics and let everyone brave enough go at it. Whoever spits the most verses, quatrains, long poems, or quotes by Rumi wins the right to proclaim peace and throw a feast in honor of sanity, brotherhood, sisterhood, and childhood.

Is that likely to happen? No, not very, but the ecstatic beauty and soulful grace of Rumi’s poetry inspires human hearts to believe in possibilities beyond the predictably fatal. So does the Herculean effort it took for him to produce the works for which the world now reveres him: the ever-astonishing Masnavi, his discourses, the Divan of Shams of Tabriz, and various letters and sermons.


As one of his most celebrated translators, Coleman Barks, has noted with amazement, Rumi seems to have composed no less than a dozen poems every single day for the final 12 years of his extraordinary life. Within that incandescent  corpus are works that address nearly aspect of what it means to be human and what it could mean to embrace life with a sense of divine co-creation. This last idea, in modern terms, is much less mystical than some might think when considering the environmentalist concept of people as stewards of the earth rather abusers of it. 

For the full post by Aberjhani please click this link:
A 2013 Poetry Fantasy on Rumi’s 806th Birthday - Bright Skylark Literary Productions

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